Dad navigates his way home in one of those terminal traffic jams and greets mom at the door by barking about his cold dinner. Irritated by the sharpness of his reprimand, mom hustles the kids off to bed with a few sharp words of her own. Dad broods through dinner and skips the usual cuddles and story time. "And the next likely scenario is that the stressed-out kids kick the dog," chuckles family psychology researcher David Almeida.
Just as the common cold can infect an entire family, emotions can also be contagious, a growing body of evidence suggests. "[Negative emotion] can have a domino effect or a chain reaction," explains Almeida, an associate professor at the University of Arizona. "What we found is that a parent's mood can predict the mood of the entire family. Even being grouchy can have a noxious effect."
Four related studies published recently in the quarterly Journal of Marriage and the Family suggest the impact of second-hand emotions tends to be most pronounced in traditional nuclear families where a man is the primary breadwinner. The studies concluded working mothers and even mothers who were severely ill did a better job of protecting family members from the fallout of their emotions and stress. "There are a lot of implications in this research for Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch," says Robert Milardo, a University of Maine professor and the journal's editor, "and one of them is a message that we have to do a better job of managing the stress of our work lives and taking a few deep breaths to diffuse our emotions before we head in the front door."
Almeida, who focused his research on nuclear families, says he never set out to prove it was fathers who initiated emotional chain reactions. In fact, he says he was somewhat startled when the research concluded "dear old dad" is most often the chief protagonist.
Yet that was the conclusion he and his colleague, Reed W. Larson of the University of Illinois, arrived at after asking about 400 families to record their daily stressors. Larson gave his subjects beepers and asked them to send a coded message every time they were aggravated. "What we found," says Almeida. "Is that if one family member hit their pager, the rest of the family was hitting theirs within a few hours, sometimes sooner."
Conversely, research found that when a working mother encountered tension on the job, a chain reaction didn't necessarily occur once she arrived home. Though these moms hit their beepers, the researchers often found they didn't get a related response from other family members.
"It wasn't our intention to be sexist, but being very objective, what we found is that the chain reaction was most often triggered by the male parent, even when the mother was also working outside the home," says Almeida. "I can only speculate that it stems from the way men are taught to process their emotions. I'm not sure they are as good at separating things."
Gary Stanek, a Stamford, Conn.-based family therapist who writes the "Dad to Dad," column for The Stamford Advocate, agrees.
"That's one of the things I try to point out to fathers. We really need to work on our emotional intelligence," he says. "We've known for a long time that women have a much better sense of how to do that. And it's something we have to learn from them." Still, Stanek notes dads are not the only ones who need to take heed of the findings. "The fact that there's a chain reaction in the family means that more than one person is getting involved and responding," he says. It may be that moms also need to take a look at their behavior.
Indeed, Almeida agrees, "Moms also have a role in passing the anxiety and stress onto their kids. Things can stop with them if they develop more awareness, too."
The researcher notes there may even be health benefits involved in working on the entire family dynamic.
He notes that on the same day families he studied reported stress triggers like sitting in traffic jams or a professional crisis, they also reported physical symptoms like stomachaches and headaches.
That's no surprise to Emma K. Adams, a researcher at the University of Chicago's Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work.
Adams studies the impact of life's challenges -- especially family and work -- on the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol levels should peak in the morning, explains Adams; if they are too high at day's end, all sorts of problems can ensue.