'Affective Presence': How You Make Other People Feel - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Some people can walk into a room and instantly put everyone at ease. Others seem to make teeth clench and eyes roll no matter what they do
-
A small body of psychology research supports the idea that the way a person tends to make others feel is a consistent and measurable part of his personality. Researchers call it “affective presence.”
-
10 years ago in a study by Noah Eisenkraft and Hillary Anger Elfenbein. They put business-school students into groups, had them enroll in all the same classes for a semester, and do every group project together
- ...15 more annotations...
-
The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers
-
affective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings—those with positive affective presence make other people feel good, even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative affective presence.
-
“To use common, everyday words, some people are just annoying. It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed all the time,”
-
Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are more central to their social networks—in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmates considered them to be friends. They also got more romantic interest from others in a separate speed-dating study.
-
leaders who make other people feel good by their very presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to more innovation. Subordinates are more likely to voice their ideas, too, to a leader with positive affective presence.
-
xactly what people are doing that sets others at ease or puts them off hasn’t yet been studied. It may have to do with body language, or tone of voice, or being a good listener
-
Throughout the day, one experiences emotional “blips” as Elfenbein puts it—blips of annoyance or excitement or sadness. The question is, “Can you regulate yourself so those blips don’t infect other people?” she asks. “Can you smooth over the noise in your life so other people aren’t affected by it?”
-
This “smoothing over”—or emotional regulation—could take the form of finding the positive in a bad situation, which can be healthy.
-
it could also take the form of suppressing one’s own emotions just to keep other people comfortable, which is less so.
-
Elfenbein notes that positive affective presence isn’t inherently good, either for the person themselves, or for their relationships with others. Psychopaths are notoriously charming
-
Neither is negative affective presence necessarily always a bad thing in a leader—think of a football coach yelling at the team at halftime, motivating them to make a comeback.