Every day we are bombarded by potential contagions: whether a physical ailment such as measles or influenza or something as seemingly harmless as a yawn or popular Internet meme. For better or worse, emotions can be contagious too, passed on from one person to another through verbal and nonverbal cues, with or without the awareness that we are being affected by another person’s emotional state. In many cases, the only route for such transmission is observation. For example, who hasn’t felt better after watching an uplifting film or cried while watching a sad movie. In the lab, scientists have determined that levels of the stress hormone cortisol increased in individuals undergoing a stress test but also in passive observers who watch the stress test through a one-way mirror or on a television screen. Often, the magnitude of the observer’s response is affected by how well he knows or can relate to the person.

As reported in a recent PLOS ONE article(1), we now know that even a physiological response to cold temperatures is readily transmissible from one person to another, although many of us who live in northern climates probably knew this long before any scientific study: Watching children playing in the snow or someone shoveling snow can often send a chill through us even though we are watching from a heated building. However, a group of scientists in the UK and Germany was not satisfied with anecdotal evidence of temperature contagion, as they named this phenomenon. They did the experiment and generated the data.

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