Each group was on a short residential classical music performance tour.Įach young musician recorded daily moods and social interactions. Two groups of adolescents, 79 in total, aged 15 to 19-years-old participated in the study. The study found teenagers’ moods become more similar to people they spend time with, that a bad mood is more infectious than a good, and these individuals did not select others with whom to socialise simply to match the way they felt themselves.
There was no evidence adolescents either avoid or seek contact with peers in a negative or positive frame of mind - suggesting mood does not determine popularity in the short term and socialising with someone in a low mood is a risk most are prepared to take. While a teen ‘catches’ a low mood from a friend, the friend feels uplifted in the process. The wide-ranging findings show mood goes both ways. ‘We hope it is a step towards understanding why people fall into prolonged low states, the social factors that determine emotional wellbeing in adolescents, and, in the long run, how it may be possible to provide emotional support leading to improved mental health.’ Mood is contagious, and though both positive and negative moods are ‘caught’, bad moods are more potent. The authors Dr Per Block, of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and Dr Stephanie Burnett Heyes, of The University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology, hope the ground-breaking study could lead to improved understanding of emotional wellbeing.ĭr Block says, ‘Our study shows conclusively that individuals are affected by how others around them are feeling. Thus, short-term social distancing might benefit psychological well-being and memory performance, but extended social distancing has a negative impact on mood and memory.Mental health and emotional wellbeing among young people could be better understood by findings in a recently-published paper from Oxford and Birmingham universities, which reveal that teenagers catch moods from friends and bad moods are more contagious than good ones. Subsequent analyses indicated that memory errors were mediated by lonely mood in particular.
The relation between social distancing duration and both negative mood and memory errors followed the same U-shaped function: negative moods and memory errors initially decreased as social distancing duration increased, and then at approximately 30 days, they began to increase. In this research, we investigated the effect of social distancing duration on negative moods and memory. Although social distancing improves physical health in terms of helping to reduce viral transmission, its psychological consequences are less clear, particularly its effects on memory. In the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment, the current best defence against COVID-19 is social distancing – staying at home as much as possible, keeping distance from others, and avoiding large gatherings.
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