I first heard about the Emotional Contagion scale while reading Becca Caddy’s screentime. It is a scale to measure how likely you are to take on emotions of others.
The academic study says the mean (average) is 3.62.
My score is 60 and I am more likely to take on negative emotions (anger, fear, anxiety).
That means I’m having an experience that is markedly more intense than most people have when exposed to the same content.
This explains why some people can drink from the “the internet firehose” (as John Naughton calls it) and still function in daily life while I find it impossible to continue coping if I am constantly exposed to anxiety inducing news or angry people shouting at each other. Witnessing intense emotions it physiologically overstimulating and causes dysregulation.
The scale itself is in this PDF if you’d like to see what your results are. It’s based on self reporting your reactions to emotion so it does require a level of self awareness for an accurate score.
Most people would be surprised by this because the stereotype is that autistic people lack empathy (which may be because we sometimes emote or react differently) whereas many of us are in fact hyper empathetic. Katherine May mentions that in this podcast chat with Glennon Doyle.
It’s the same old story of autistics being told we are “worse at” dealing with something when we are in fact having a completely different experience. The test involves physiological reactions that your body has to emotional content and I’m amazed that most people don’t feel these things in their body. Food for thought as I consider boundaries with online platforms during an election year.
