The 4 Dimensional Leader

Many of us may be easily affected by the moods and emotions of others around us. Research suggest that this is because of an underlying human tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally with that person. Thisis known as emotional contagion and is most easily recognised to be present when infants become distressed or happy because another, nearby person is distressed, or happy.

The ability to transfer moods appears to be innate in humans and emotional contagion is a concept that has been studied within organizations.

Eminent psychologists like Howard Friedman and Richard Wiseman have been studying charisma and emotion and have apparently discovered that it’s all to do with being highly expressive.

Professor Friedman of the University of California became curious about charisma in the 1980s. Perhaps because of the sad lack of it during the decade of over extended shoulder pads and the ‘greed is good’ mantra. Anyway he suspected it had to do with non-verbal behaviour so he created a test to try and find out. The Affective Communication Test or ACT for short allows people to self identify how easily able they are to express their emotions using their body and voice.

Test participants were asked to score themselves on a scale of 1-4 as to whether a statement was true or not about them. Statements similar to: “I am easily able to flirt with my eyes” or “I can easily communicate an emotion on the telephone.” The test was designed to identify whether someone was a high or low expressive person. In other words, were they able to unambiguously express emotions so that people around them could recognise what type of mood they were in.

After testing a random group Friedman and his team then paired two high-scoring individuals and invited them to sit in a room together with a pair of two low scorers for just two minutes. The subjects were allowed to look at each other but asked not to speak. After the experience they were invited to complete a questionnaire about how they felt during the experiment.

In every case they discovered that the low scorers had been affected by the mood of the high scorers, demonstrating that the presence of an expressive person communicating an emotion, even non-verbally, is powerful enough to have an affect on others. However the low scoring, less expressive people had little if no affect on the high scorers.

Friedman called this effect ‘emotional contagion’.

If we combine this with some interesting, recent studies of leaders in business we can begin to understand how emotion and charisma are linked.

Research conducted by two pairs of psychologists Cote and Saavedra (2005) and Bono and llies (2006) came to similar conclusions by observing leaders interacting with their people. This body of research demonstrated that leaders considered to be charismatic transmit their emotions to followers more effectively, compared with non-charismatic leaders. Charismatic leaders were also observed to be able to literally change the mood of their employees merely by walking into a room. Their mood was communicated by the power of their presence and became contagious in a very short time.

So what was going on?

How was the mood being communicated?

It may be staring us in the face.

Charles Darwin, was the first to seriously study how our faces reflect and communicate our emotions and his work continues to influence contemporary thinkers in the field.

In the 1960s San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman found that facial expressions do in fact indicate a person’s emotional state and are present in early infancy. Even a person born blind has the same facial expressions as someone who is sighted because facial expression is not simply learned it is hardwired into the brain and is universal in nature. Ekman discovered that many, human facial expressions are common to all races and cultures around the world. In fact animators have utilised his findings and theories of ‘facial coding’ to make animated characters faces appear more human.

Dr. Dan Hill is a psychologist working in the field of micro gestures and how they express and reveal emotions, particularly in the area of facial coding and eye tracking. He is interested in the science of emotions and how that might apply in the commercial market place of advertising.

Hill says that the whole face is the window to the emotions not just the eyes because the 43 key facial muscles are attached directly to the skin of the face; therefore any spontaneous flickers of movement can easily be detected. Even though these movements are small and very quick we humans are natural, facial coders and can read what mood a person’s in by their the micro facial gestures. In fact we rely on them particularly when verbal communication becomes confusing and difficult. Apparently we humans make our decisions emotionally but justify them rationally.

Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at Tufts University co-wrote a paper called "The Face of Success" which was published in the journal Psychological Science detailing his findings around people who were asked to identify successful, charismatic business leaders simply by looking at photographs of faces. The study revealed that the test group were able to accurately guess levels of competence, dominance, likeability and trustworthiness just by looking at their facial expressions.

Emotional Contagion can be activated in two forms:

'Implicit' emotional contagion

This relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although it has been demonstrated that emotional contagion can, and does, occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through Emails and "chats" are affected by the other's emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.

The second form is 'Explicit' emotional contagion

Contrary to the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are times when others' emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose a leader or manager wants to convince or influence others directly they may do so by consciously behaving and acting in a way that communicates a forced passion and enthusiasm. The positive emotions are then like an act with a purpose of "contaminating" the others' feelings. Explicit and intentional mood contagion can also be activated by giving a team a reward, or treat, in order to manipulate their emotions.

The emotional contagion process is essentially a primitive, automatic and unconscious behavior. When people interact each perceives the emotional expressions of the other. They can then be thought of as senders and receivers of emotion. If one sender has more personal energy the receiver may begin to automatically mimic the emotional expressions of the sender. As high energy behaviour has more impact than low energy behaviour a process of afferent feedback is triggered and the senders expressions are translated by the reciever into actually feeling the emotions the sender feels, thus leading to emotional convergence. Unfortunately studies have revealed that unpleasant emotions are more likely to lead to mood contagion than are pleasant emotions.


Understanding how to manage energy in the four dimensions (Physical, emotional, Intellectual and Motivational) can help you become what we at Charismalab call a 4 Dimensional Leader - personally and professionally.

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