emotional contagion

I've recently read this interesting post on Creating Passionate Users. It's about these neuroscientific concepts I can totally relate and agree with. I'm talking about Mirror neurons, Emotional contagion and Happy People.
We learn from watching the others, from imitating (mirroring), from borrowing their ways without our conscious intention. Staying around or even talking with people that have a certain attitude - wheter is anxious, nervous, inspired or enthusiastic - affects us more that we know.

Regarding the effect of mirror neurons and its related concept of emotional contagion on personal performance, neurologist Richard Restak offers this advice:

"If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, try to surround yourself with people possessing these qualities. And try to limit the time you spend with people given to pessimism and expressions of futility. Unfortunately, negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones, thanks to the phenomena of emotional contagion."

and also
From a paper on Memetics and Social Contagion,

"...social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious. Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is the social contagion thesis; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through, and leap between, populations more like outbreaks of measels or chicken pox than through a process of rational
choice."

Happy people are actually positive people, people that trust their own ability of taking control of their lives and fulfilling their dreams.

Happines is associated most heavily with the left (i.e. logical) side of the brain, while anger is associated with the right (emotional, non-logical) side of the brain.

"Evidence suggests that the left-siders may better handle stressful events on a biological level. For example, studies show that they have a higher function of cells that help defend the body, known as natural killer cells, compared with individuals who have greater right side activity. Left-sided students who face a stressful exam have a smaller drop in their killer cells than right-siders. Other research indicates that generally left-siders may have lower levels of the stress hormone, cortisol."

It's also important to notice that while we all have a lot of respect for physical biological contagions, we do NOT have much respect for physical(science has known for quite some time that "emotions" are not simply a fuzzy-feeling concept, but represent physical changes in the brain) emotional contagions.

Ok now, lots of copy-paste in this post, no doubt about it, but it's just that there are so many interesting discoveries and concepts and I needed to post at least some of them. Bottom line - get surrounded with people that have already achieved what you want or posess the features you need in order to achieve something. This would make you feel confident and ready to go on conquering the world! Pretty logical, huh? Impossible is nothing indeed. ;)

PS: It seems more people noticed and agreed to Kathy's post. Russel. Ian tait. Me so proud. :)