A healthy self-other distinction is critical for an accurate understanding of ourselves and others
About 15 years ago, while working as a general manager in India, I frequently needed to attend official events sponsored by embassies and international networking organizations. I found myself surrounded by other foreigners like me who came to do business in India from all over the world and from different layers of society. Dealing with people who came from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds taught me to first take the stance of an observer, watching and listening to people, in order to learn the best way to approach others and initiate a conversation.
Eventually, I started to experiment a little bit with my observations. As I was introduced to a group of foreign businesspeople, I would remark, “I see you have just recently arrived in India, but your colleagues seem to have been here longer.” Most of the time I was spot on, and the people who had just introduced themselves would look at me as if I were clairvoyant. “That’s correct, but how did you know this?” they would ask with surprise. I would explain to them that people who had just arrived in India had not yet been “infected” by the enigmatic Indian head bob, while people who have been in India a while longer often show a slight head bob when they introduce themselves.
This funny “icebreaker” immediately created a positive connection with people I had just met. Moreover, it made for interesting conversations, as the newcomers became aware of the unconscious behavioral mannerisms that they “inherited” while living in a culture that was so different from their own.
Generally speaking, it is a positive sign when visitors take on the behavior of their host culture to forge a connection with their new neighbors and coworkers. I have seen my own Dutch colleagues take it too far, however, arriving for a meeting at our Indian office dressed in more traditional Indian clothing than my Indian colleagues wore! This made everyone feel a bit awkward, and at times I felt embarrassed by the over-the-top behavior of my fellow countrymen. During these occasions, I tried to imagine how it would feel to be back at the Dutch headquarters and have some foreigner rock up for a meeting wearing clogs.
Most of these behavioral adaptations are attributable to a combination of emotional and behavioral contagion, both of which generally remain below our conscious radar. This natural synchronizing behavior is critically important to understanding others in social interaction. It can, however, become an overpowering influence, making people feel and behave in ways that they normally would not.
Our tendency for embodied sharing of emotions and behaviors is positively correlated with our level of stress. In other words, the more stress we feel, the more susceptible we become to the emotions and behaviors of people around us. Historical events relating to mass psychogenic illness give us a sense of how powerful emotional and behavioral contagion can be.
Mass psychogenic illness, sometimes called mass hysteria and scientifically known as conversion disorder, involves the propagation of symptoms for which there is no known cause throughout a group of people, sometimes even an entire population. To illustrate, in the Middle Ages a social phenomenon called “dancing mania” or “dancing plague” spread across Europe. Large groups of people, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, would spontaneously and uncontrollably dance and jump together, with several people even dancing to the extent that they succumbed to heart attack, stroke, or some other self-inflicted injury.
“[T]he victims of dancing epidemics were experiencing altered states of consciousness. Onlookers in 1374 also spoke of the afflicted as wild, frenzied, and seeing visions; the dancers yelled out the names of devils, had strange aversions to pointed shoes and the colour red, and said they were drowning in a red sea of blood”.(1)
A more recent example of behavioral contagion occurred in the late summer of 2011, at the LeRoy Junior- Senior High School, in the town of Leroy, New York. Several teenage students began to exhibit unexplained medical symptoms similar to those seen in “Tourette syndrome” (repetitive verbal outbursts, speech difficulties, facial tics, muscle seizures, etc.). Officials could not identify an environmental cause for the behavior and suggested that perhaps social media had helped to spread the so-called “infection.” One factor that pointed to a probable psychological cause was the fact that the individuals who posted their symptoms on Facebook recovered more slowly than those who did not communicate publicly about their ailments.
There are many more examples of mass psychogenic illness throughout the centuries and around the world. These instances seem to occur largely among women and schoolchildren. The cause for this unequal distribution among populations might be attributable to the fact that people of lower status tend to be more susceptible to the influence of others, and do not have the same freedom to deal with stress that people of higher status enjoy. Consequently, collective conversion disorders tend to be more prevalent in cultures where occurrences of severe stress are frequent and gender equality is low.
This phenomenon remains controversial, as it is difficult to substantiate symptoms when they appear to be of psychological origin, rendering diagnosis particularly problematic. Instances of extreme stress might underlie this form of emotional and behavioral contagion, as some researchers have hypothesized. For instance, John Waller argues that the dancing manias that occurred in the Middle Ages might have been caused by acute distress, due to circumstances such as failing harvests, in conjunction with the perception of pious believers that the dancing was both the affliction and its cure. (1) Other researchers have suggested that some people are just very susceptible to these forms of contagion. Many scientists do, however, believe that mass psychogenic illness is a real phenomenon and that it can afflict anybody if certain critical factors line up.
The historical events recounted above are extreme examples of emotional and behavioral contagion. In his book entitled Mentalizing the Body, Ulrich Schultz Venrath points out that these mass social phenomena are “highlighting the collective breakdown of mentalizing under extreme external pressure.”(2)
It is not surprising that Schultz Venrath views the cause of mass psychogenic illness as a failure to mentalize. Mentalization is our ability to reflect on the mental states of oneself and those of others. A moderate level of stress can narrow our attentional focus and heighten our tendency to reflect on the behavior of ourselves or others.
When our mentalization faculties are uninhibited we can gather social information through our embodied sharing of emotions and behaviors. By paying attention to our own feelings and behavior and recognizing that our responses are a reflection of what others are feeling and doing, we can infer what is going on in their minds. Moreover, with this understanding, we are better able to regulate our own emotions and behavior and help others to regulate theirs. Moderate to high stress, however, can inhibit our mentalization efforts and induce in us a mental and physical state of fight, flight, or freeze.
When mentalization is taken offline something else happens: We lose our self-other distinction. We can become so “infected” by the emotions, feelings, moods, and behaviors of others that we aren’t conscious of, or able to distinguish between the emotions and behaviors that originate within ourselves, and those that we “inherit” from others.
Sometimes this sense of oneness can be awe-inspiring. Many of us have had the experience of attending a concert or sporting event and being caught up in the euphoric and exaggerated behavior of the entire crowd. At other times, however, emotional and behavioral contagion can become a destructive influence, as is the case with hooligans who “infect” one other (as well as outsiders) to propagate their angry state of mind and accompanying aggressive behavior.
A diffuse self-other distinction has another downside. When we are unable to distinguish between our own emotional states and behaviors and those of others, we tend to equate our own experiences with those of others.
In their book entitled The Neural Basis of Mentalizing, Micheal Gilead and Kevin Ochsner point out that we “need to be able to draw the line between our own experiences and those of others to be able to comprehend the world around us more accurately.” The authors define the self-other distinction as “the ability to implicitly or explicitly differentiate between sensations, knowledge, and feelings of the self and the other.”(3)
Intriguingly, based on their review of literature on the topic of stress as a modulator of self-other distinction, Gilead and Ochsner argue that the influence of stress on the ability to distinguish between self and other was different for men than for women. They note that “across all measures of self-other distinction, stress-induced lowers self-other differentiation for men, and increases self-other differentiation for women [citations omitted].”(3)
Gilead and Ochsner further propose that this is in line with the “tend-and-befriend theory,” propounded in 2000 by Shelley Taylor, which explains that while women who experience stress tend to look for ways to affiliate with others, men respond with a fight, flight, or freeze response. The self-other distinction helps women to see that affiliation with others can help lower stress, as others do not necessarily experience a situation the same way they do. Men, on the other hand, tend to assume that others experience the situation as they do, and view distancing themselves from others as the best way to lower their stress levels.
Impairments in the ability to distinguish between self and other, a condition common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), can explain the anomalous responses of some people to emotional and behavioral contagion. According to De Meulemeester and colleagues:
[Self-other distinction] impairments in BPD are assumed to be expressed in two directions. On the one hand, individuals with BPD are assumed to experience emotional contagion, in that they tend to conflate others’ feelings with their own (“altercentric bias”). On the other hand, BPD patients are also assumed to have difficulty in taking the perspective of others, suggesting difficulties in inhibiting the “self” when representing the “other” (i.e., egocentric bias) [citations omitted].(4)
Individuals with BPD also tend to have impaired interoceptive awareness, and therefore sensorial input that comes from outside of their body is likely to be perceived by such individuals as coming from within their own body. Due to this limited interoceptive awareness, their ability to mentalize on an explicit level is impaired. As a result, they take on the emotions and behaviors of others more readily. This in turn decreases their sense of agency, making them feel like they have little control over their thoughts and behavior, and thus over their lives.
Finally, people with BPD have difficulties understanding that others can experience a situation differently than they do. This limitation is strengthened by their unawareness of the extent to which their own behaviors and emotional expressions “infect” those around them. They tend to be “blind” to their own emotional expressions and behaviors and accuse others of being the source of those feelings and behaviors, which they themselves have externalized.
In light of the foregoing discussion, it should be evident that a full appreciation of the human tendency for emotional and behavioral contagion, together with a healthy self-other distinction, is critical to understanding what is going on in the minds of people.
Moreover, taking the origin and impact of emotional and behavioral contagion into consideration is critical to regulating emotions and behavior. There are a number of ways to improve your abilities on this basic mentalizing level. To get you started in the right direction, I will conclude this article by sharing three important initial steps:
First, conduct a self-assessment to determine where you fit on the embodied sharing susceptibility spectrum (in other words, your inclination to “catch” the emotions and mimic the behavior of others). Once you have established a baseline, you can use it to detect and regulate your sensitivity to this type of influence.
Second, recognize and actively engage in the embodied sharing process, as this will facilitate emotional and cognitive self-regulation. Here, the focus should be on achieving a healthy self-other distinction.
Third, improve your ability to detect and decode relevant embodied signals and cues in yourself and others, and use them to make meaningful inferences in support of your mentalizing skills. Additionally, monitor how your emotional and behavioral displays influence those around you.(5)
Thank you for reading this article.
References:
John Waller. (2009). A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania. , 373(9664), 0–625. doi:10.1016/s0140–6736(09)60386-x
Schultz-Venrath, U ( 2024). Mentalizing the Body: Integrating Body and Mind in Psychotherapy. Routledge.
Gilead, M., & Ochsner, K. N. (Eds.). (2021). The neural basis of mentalizing. Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5
De Meulemeester C, Lowyck B, Panagiotopoulou E, Fotopoulou A, Luyten P. Self-other distinction and borderline personality disorder features: Evidence for egocentric and altercentric bias in a self-other facial morphing task. Personal Disord. 2021 Jul;12(4):377–388. doi: 10.1037/per0000415. Epub 2020 Nov 16. PMID: 33197197; PMCID: PMC7611438.
van der Putten, A. A. J. T. (2023). Mastering Mentalization: Volume III, Strategic Mentalizing. ToM PRESS.
Comments