Chain

If you find that your friends start a number of upbeat feeds on the social network Facebook, and that your mood and performance soar along their suggestion, it is probably more than coincidence. I didn't know where to start, but I did know that emotional contagion has been recently demonstrated by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In The New Leaders, Daniel Goleman quotes the example of circulatory system being a closed-loop system which is self-regulating because "what's happening in the circulatory system of others around us does not impact our own system." On the other hand, an open-loop system depends largely on external sources to manage itself. Our limbic system is one good example.

I found out more about emotional contagion after a child died in our hospital last month. Well. I do not know if the eight-year-old boy really died of a contagious disease. Everyone talks about the unfortunate child, but nobody knows the exact story. I spoke to the daddy of the child today. Three more doctors joined in, and we began to talk about our educated guess, like a trial lawyer making a case to the jury, explaining various aspects of this difficult case, some of which, in my desire to protect the privacy, I did not put down here. Of course, there is always more we can do, and I reminded myself that we should spend time listening to the story of the daddy.

And then the father told us more: how badly he missed his son who fell sick after the Father's Day, the flickering moment he thought about going to heaven to look after his son, and why he worried his wife could collapse by the time new school term starts in September (when there won't be chance to wake up their kid for school).

At first I looked calm and listened.

Then I started to feel a knot in my stomach.

And teardrops.