Comparing Emotions Are Contagious, By Marko Ahtisaari And...

â€Å"Mirroring: Emotions are Contagious† When two people interact, numerous mechanisms are at play that create a connection between the individuals. For instance, without knowing it, people often tend to mimic each other’s postures and speech styles during discussion. Also emotions are contagious: according to a study, exposure to pictures of facial expressions of emotions activated the same facial muscles needed to produce a similar expression and led to reports of experiencing similar feelings in the observers. Astonishingly, this happened even if the pictures were shown so quickly that the observers didn’t experience a conscious perception of the photo. The Sync Project By Marko Ahtisaari and Ketki Karanam â€Å"Movement: Music Moves You, Even If You Refuse to Dance† Humans are one of the extremely few species that can synchronize their body movement to music. Brain imaging studies have shown that the motor areas of the brain are active even during passive listening to musical rhythms without any movement. It has been said that music prepares people for movement. But how is this special property of music connected to the experience of emotions? It has been proposed that the aforementioned â€Å"human mirror† neuron system could in fact also encode the movements conveyed by melodies. This would mean that the system might process movement in music like physical movement. In other words, an upward going melody would be processed in the brain as upward movement. And as