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”.
This concept was first described nearly 10 years ago in a study led by Noah Eisenkraft, a business professor at Washington University. He put business-school students into groups, had them register for all the same classes for a semester, and do every group project together. Then the members of each group rated how much every other member made them feel eight different emotions: stressed, bored, angry, sad, calm, relaxed, happy, and enthusiastic. The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers.
It’s been known for some time that emotions are infectious. But 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.
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. Hector Madrid, an organizational-behavior professor, has found that leaders with positive affective presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to creativity. Inferiors are more likely to voice their ideas, too.
However, Elfenbein notes that positive affective presence isn’t naturally good. 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. She suspects that affective presence is closely related to emotional intelligence which one can use to cure cancer or to be a criminal mastermind.
【小题1】What does the underlined phrase “make teeth clench” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．Make people nervous. | B．Make people glad. |
| C．Make people comfortable. | D．Make people calm. |
| A．To suggest leaders are better at sharing information. |
| B．To prove leaders also have negative affective presence. |
| C．To indicate people with positive affective presence are creative. |
| D．To show positive affective presence can promote social interaction. |
| A．It is for motivating others. |
| B．It is a double-edged sword. |
| C．It is affected by one’s own emotion. |
| D．It is the positive emotional influence on others. |
| A．Affective Presence: Secret Part of Your Personalities |
| B．Emotional Signature: Why Emotions are Infectious |
| C．Affective Presence: How You Make People Feel |
| D．Emotional Intelligence: Big Part of Affective Presence |
