Oh, no!
Suppose I told you that a disease so contagious existed that it could spread with remarkable speed from one person or animal to a thousand or more in a matter of minutes. Some humans can transmit it to some animals and some animals can transmit it to some people Even more frightening, this neuro-pathogen typically enters through the eye and disrupts retinal cells to gain access to the most ancient part of brain. Once there, it disrupts the autonomic nervous system which controls all those vital functions necessary for life. Symptoms associated with the disease include increased sweating or panting, elevated heart rate and blood glucose, gastro-intestinal discomfort, and various displacement behaviors (e.g. nail-biting, hair-pulling or -chewing, increased eating or drinking). In some individuals the disease or recurrent bouts of it may result in death.
Now before you dash off a Twitter or Facebook post under some heading like, “Horrible New Disease Kills People and their Pets!!!!”—stop. Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and get yourself under control. And no, I didn’t play a cruel joke on you. This condition does exist as described. But it’s a natural dis-ease we and other animals create ourselves and may spread to others willing to accept it, including each other. The disease is fear and it spreads via a mind-body mechanism known as emotional contagion, most likely thanks to the activity of mirror neurons. While the scientific jury is out regarding whether animals other than the few species studied possess this ability, years of clinical experience combined with the effect of person studies make me confident that it does.
In social species, individuals quickly learn to orient toward those they perceive as more mentally and physically fit for cues regarding proper responses. Old sayings such as “Monkey see, monkey do” and “Little pitchers have big ears” remind us of how attentive young children may be to what adults do and say when we think they’re not paying attention. Or recall how readily young animals mimic the behavior of the parents or others belonging to their species. And just as bad news often travels much faster than good news, cues that communicate fear travel much faster than those communicating positive or neutral emotions. In wild animals, this makes sense because the survival of the young (and next generation) literally depends on this kind of communication. Similarly, as animals get older they learn to heed warnings from others in the group and may begin to issue some of their own. Additionally some may tune in to the fear generated by members of other species. Such also is the nature of the human-companion animal bond communication.
In the past, the “little boy who cried wolf” effect would eliminate frivolous fear-mongering humans and animals. Such culling was essential for survival because fear responses do not come cheap. They require a great deal of energy and take their toll on the entire body-mind system. Consequently, groups soon learn to ignore the alarm calls from those who abuse the system. When the day comes that the faker experiences a true crisis and no one responds, he or she will pay the price for their unwise behavior. Those in the group who kept responding to the impostor instead of finding a more reliable alarm system also will suffer.
Today, though, technology enables humans to transmit fear at even more alarming rates. In her article “Nothing Snowballs OnLine Like Fear Adrienne Berard describes the work of Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist who developed a program that enables him to mine Twitter conversations for particular words. Specifically, he zeroed in on words that reflected the emotional component of messages about Ebola. He’d already recognized that emotional contagion could occur electronically, but he was surprised by how rapidly fear could spread compared to other emotions. A month after the announcement of the first case of Ebola in the U.S. and even though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had only confirmed 4 cases at that time, 1 in 6 Americans believed Ebola ranked as the country’s #1 health problem!
Or consider a study conducted by Johannes Eichstaedt and his colleagues. They evaluated more than a million Tweets from 1300 U.S. counties for words associated with anger and hostility. They then compared these findings to actual deaths from atherosclerotic heart disease as reported in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Center’s data base. When they did, they discovered that the number of such Tweets reliably predicted the number of deaths from heart disease; the more angry and hostile Tweets, the higher the death rate. Considering the role fear plays in anger and hostility, that’s a pretty sobering thought!
What does (real or imagined) fear’s accelerated transmission rate mean for the animals with whom we share our lives? For one thing, the emotional contagion that occurs between us in general may occur even faster that it does on social media. In the time it takes to write, send, and receive a reply to an electronic message, we and our animals may have shared many more emotional exchanges.
Consider this benign example. As I was writing this, Bamboo got up from his bed on the corner of my desk, walked to my mug of 
water, stuck his head into it and began to drink. There was once a time when this would have bothered me—germs and all that, doncha know—but this is no longer the case. Instead it’s background activity, part of our working routine that carries no emotional charge. However, this time he suddenly lifted his head and alerted to something outside. I noticed his focused body language and automatically lifted my head and became more alert to what was going on outside too. Then I heard the distinct clatter of a local truck 
approaching, then passing by on the road below the house. I lowered my head and, after the truck passed, Bam drank some more water. When he finished, he went back to his bed and fell asleep again. In much less time than it took me to write this, we partnered in a silent exchange and processing of multiple emotions and their physiological effects.
Many of you may recognize this as a variation on the effect-of-person theme, the ability of humans and animals to change each others’ physiology. Returning to Ferrara’s work, what if the person’s fear has electronic origins? John and Mary stare at their laptops, notebooks, or smart phones processing multiple brief packets of fear-generating content. The more they read, they more upset they become and their physiology and behavior changes accordingly. Sometimes they even do this while they walk their dogs or go through the motions of playing with their animals. The more appalling the news, the more likely they’ll share it with their humans contacts. Soon they whip by any positive or neutral items seeking more related to the horror. They literally feed their fears. In spite of their racing hearts or sweaty hands, they can’t wait to pass the latest dreadful tidbit on.
Relative to John and Mary’s animals, they’ll either handle their humans’ response to this invisible fear or they won’t. Fortunately for most of us, our dogs and our (often less susceptible) cats make the choice made by the wise villagers to deal with the little boy who cried wolf: they learn to ignore us. They keep walking beside us engrossed in the natural world around them and enjoy chasing and retrieving their sticks and balls. When our heart rates and blood pressures soar in response to the umpteenth inflammatory political comment we allowed to frighten us, they turn their backs on us and go to sleep. If the assault on their physiology approaches their threshold, they may get up and leave the room.
Those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones may literally, i.e. physiologically, pick up on our fears. Only unlike those of us who choose to read posts or watch videos that feed our fears, our animals can’t perceive any change in their environments except their increasingly distressed people. This creates two problems for these animals:
- They must deal with all the negative effects the fear they “caught” from their owners may have on their bodies and minds.
- Because they can’t perceive what’s frightening their owners, there’s nothing they can do to prevent this from happening or to protect themselves when it does.
The really sad part of all this is that we may become so caught up in our fear-fests that we’re oblivious to any affects this is having on our animals. In the worst case scenario, the stressed animal seeks to dissipate all the negative effects of the fear by chewing our belongings, eating everything on the kitchen counter, or having explosive diarrhea in the bedroom, the discovery of which may turn the the already edgy owner into a raving maniac.
Emotional contagion provided us with an elegant, nonverbal mechanism whereby we and our animals could communicate our innermost feelings with each other any time we want and even when we don’t. It would be a shame to desensitize or, worse, to undermine our animals’ health and behavior because we choose to engage in online fear frenzies in the presence of the more sensitive creatures instead of caring enough either to leave the room or get a grip.
Excellent post. You nailed it!