Location Taken: Nebraska
Time Taken: November 2012
Have you ever heard of emotion chameleons?
It’s a fairly common thing amongst people with social anxiety issues. Basically, you shift your emotions and body language to match that of the people around you. This helps you blend in better, since people react better to those who are similar to themselves.
Fairly simple, really. We all do it to one extent or another. It’s part of how we learn how to communicate, after all, imitating others. But some people do it stronger than average, so they actually can notice when it happens, and many of those have trouble not doing it when they don’t want to.
This can lead to a few troublesome things, you see. If someone is irritated, or angry, or any of the negative emotional sets, well, you chameleon those as well. All of a sudden you’re irritated as well, purely because you’ve caught the emotion from someone else. And since you’re not actually irritated at any specific thing, it’s more awkward to get rid of.
To top it off, imagine what happens when two emotion chameleons get together, and one is running irritated. The other one picks up the emotion, and starts displaying all the signs of irritation themselves. However, the fact that the first one already has the emotion doesn’t stop them from chameleoning it. Our true emotions and the chameleoned ones are somewhat separate, after all. So now this poor unfortunate soul has a double dose of the emotions, which displays as a stronger form of irritation, which gets chameleoned again, and it just keeps cycling around. You can get into some rather nasty feedback loops that way, ending with two people being highly grumpy at each other for no good reason.
Luckily there’s a fairly easy way to cut the feedback loop: separate the people. Once they stop feeding off of the other one’s emotions, the false mimicry will fade away fairly well.
So I hope you don’t have to be stuck in a car for hours with two emotion chameleons. Road trips are already boring and irritating enough as it is.
Let’s just say there’s a reason why my parents got a larger car purely so that my sister and I didn’t have to sit right next to each other all the time.
