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They decided to follow 239 business school students who were assigned as part of their studies to small teams to work on projects.

Eisenkraft and Elfenbein wanted to examine a real-world setting similar to the ones that people experience daily-at work, the supermarket, the doctor's office. In the past when psychologists explored the emotional impact people have on one another, they engineered interactions among strangers in the laboratory. The research was published in April in the journal Psychological Science. For example, happy people can be downers. Another surprising finding: people's own character traits do not always predict the emotional effect they have on others. Positive emotions such as enthusiasm and happiness, meanwhile, are less influenced by others. So much so that certain emotions-notably discouragement, frustration and stress-are “influenced as much by who you are interacting with as by who you are,” Eisenkraft says. But the striking conclusion of this research is that without trying or even being aware of it, each person gives out a vibe-the researchers dubbed it “trait affective presence”-that affects everyone they come into contact with in the same way.

No one needs a study to tell them that they feel good when interacting with some people and bad around others. “I kept hearing about this terrible boss or this horrible co-worker, and I started thinking that we didn't really have anything in personality psychology that I could use to explain this,” Eisenkraft says. Louis, designed a study to investigate whether people also have a predictable influence on other people's moods. Two organizational behavior scientists, Noah Eisenkraft, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Hillary Anger Elfenbein of Washington University in St. For example, some individuals tend to feel relaxed regardless of what comes their way, while others are almost always anxious.

Everyone experiences a range of emotions-anger, sadness, happiness-but people usually fall back pretty quickly to their emotional baseline. An intriguing new study, however, suggests the opposite: everyone seems to have a tangible impact, changing other people's feelings in consistent ways.įor years much of the research on personality and emotion has focused on a phenomenon known as trait affect-a person's habitual feeling state. There is no shortage of examples of people who have an undeniable influence on everyone around them, but the common wisdom has been that such individuals are rare. Charismatic leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., have been known to inspire entire nations, whereas so-called toxic individuals make life hell for anyone who comes close. ELVIS PRESLEY'S mere presence caused teenage girls to scream and faint by the dozens.