Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  It is clear from clinical observation and decades of scientific research that exuberance is an important phase of acute mania for most of those who become ill. A significant percentage of people who have manic-depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament. Clearly, however, most people who are exuberant do not have manic-depressive illness. There are overlapping characteristics—high mood and expansive energy, among others—but there are critical distinctions as well. Exuberance is far from a pathological state for most who have it. It is, instead, a highly valued and integral part of who they are and how they meet the world. Understanding the role of exuberance in manic-depression can provide one perspective on exuberance—extremes in behavior will almost always illuminate more normal behavior—but there are limits to the comparisons that can be made. Still, the shading of normal exuberance into “pathological enthusiasm,” as Robert Lowell once described a manic attack, is an important as well as a cautionary phenomenon, and it is one to which we will return.

  Enthusiasm is intoxicating: it goes to the head. Just as it is hard to remember while under the spell of Champagne that beneath the fizz lies a dangerous undertow, so it is with exuberance. But if dangerous on occasion, far more often it is a delight, a lift, and a boon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Throwing Up Sky-Rockets”

  (photo credit 6.1)

  People like to be humbugged, declared P. T. Barnum. They need sizzle and flair to lighten their otherwise “drudging practicalness”: they long to catch fire, be bedazzled, be a part of something that delights them, excites them, and binds them to others. They want someone to splash their world with color; someone, as Barnum put it, to “throw up sky-rockets.” Barnum was more than glad to oblige; most people, as he knew to his advantage, shared neither his genius for invention nor his irrepressible exuberance. He was, he wrote, “blessed with a vigor and buoyancy of spirits vouchsafed to but few”; it would be, he continued, “utterly fruitless to chain down the energies peculiar to my nature.” As we shall see, he never tried. Far from chaining down his energies and spirits, Barnum set them loose to infect others.

  Emotions are contagious. We survive because we apprehend quickly in others, and then speed on their way, those emotions that alert us to risk or prospect. Emotions are part of the social glue of our immensely social species, elemental to the reverberating emotional circuitry that compels us at times to pull together and at others to disperse. Nothing, it would seem, is quite so wildly contagious as exuberance, and yet it remains curiously absent from psychological explorations of group behavior. Certainly it is easier to find studies of despair and anxiety than of infectious enthusiasm; perhaps the bent of the human condition dictates this, spelled as it is by uncertainty, suffering, and death. An undercurrent of darkness runs throughout our philosophical beliefs, and melancholy is woven into our great literature and music: “We can hear it in all acuteness in Schubert and Schumann,” wrote Leon Edel. “It sounded for us in the cosmic cadences of Beethoven; it comes at us from almost every page of poetry.” Words for desolation come apace, those for exuberance less so.

  Anyone who teaches about moods knows this to be true: it is far easier to convey the essence of depression to young doctors and graduate students than it is to depict mania or other elated moods. In part this is because the language for melancholy is such a rich and nuanced one, but it is also because those who are being taught about moods are more likely to have experienced depression than either mild or full-blown mania. This discrepancy was brought home to me when I was director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic and responsible for teaching psychiatric residents and clinical psychology interns about depression and manic-depressive illness. There was a glaring and disproportionate emphasis on clinical teaching about depression, even after taking into consideration the fact that depression is more common than mania.

  Elated mood states were given short shrift in the medical and psychological research literature as well; their seductiveness to the individuals who experienced them was seldom mentioned and there was little or no discussion of their highly infectious nature. Anyone who treats the early stages of mania knows the exhilarating maelstrom they create, but few clinicians and scientists were writing or talking about this. As someone who had experienced the fleeting glories of mania firsthand, I found the oversight grating and difficult to understand. Yet I was as incapable of describing mania as the rest of my colleagues were.

  At the height of my frustration in teaching about exultant and manic states I happened to see Jim Dale’s Tony Award—winning performance in Barnum, a musical shot through with exuberance. In a high gust of enthusiasm I wrote to Mr. Dale, explained my teaching conundrum, and asked him if he would be willing to meet with me to talk about how actors portray moods. He generously agreed to do so and turned out to be a highly intelligent observer of human behavior, as well as exceptionally thoughtful on the subject of how to depict exuberant moods and how to ignite them in others.

  When words are neither the only thing nor the most important, Dale emphasized, then action is. And music. For it is in action, in dance and in music, in the kinetic thrusting upward of arms and legs and the throwing up and back of the head, that great joy finds its highest expression. Everyone on the Barnum set, he pointed out, is in near-constant, rollicking motion. The music is fast, loud, brassy, and exhilarating. Barnum talks fast and moves faster; others who are onstage are either singing or dancing, juggling, bouncing, or leaping. Or doing them all simultaneously. Everything—music, lyrics, balloons, streamers—blasts out in primary, audacious color. Indeed, it is in the exuberance of color that the musical’s librettist, Michael Stewart, has Barnum sum up his life: “The colors of my life,” Barnum sings,

  Are bountiful and bold

  · · · · · · · ·

  The dazzle of a flame

  The glory of a rainbow

  I put them all to shame.

  No quiet browns and grays

  I’ll take my days instead

  And fill them til they overflow

  With rose and cherry reds.

  And should this sunlit world

  Grow dark one day

  The colors of my life

  Will lead a shining light

  To show the way.

  Jim Dale’s dazzling energy as Barnum electrified the rest of the cast and the audience. His actions and moods were, simply put, contagious.

  The real P. T. Barnum showed little inclination toward muted colors or a quiet existence: “I have lived so long on excitement, pepper, & mustard,” he wrote to a friend, “that plain bread & milk don’t agree with me.” He saw little reason to tone down his natural flamboyance; on the contrary, he delighted in it and used it to infuse fizz and spark into the world around him. Everything Barnum created was larger than life; his was a world of razzle-dazzle and poster colors. Neither time nor setbacks muted his zeal. When he was nearly eighty years old, the inexhaustible Barnum took his circus to London. The bewilderingly complex production required three ships to transport the twelve hundred performers and more than four hundred horses and other circus animals. Billed as a “triple 100 act circus,” it featured a “Roman Hippodrome,” one hundred chariots, and a reenactment of the destruction of Rome. There were “wondrous mid-air feats” and “Mirthful and Astounding Visions.” The “united enchantments, delusions and displays of all ancient and modern magicians of every clime,” proclaimed one circus poster, were “commonplace and puerile, compared with the Supernatural Illusions [which are] for the first time exhibited, without extra charge, in the Great Show’s Electric-Lighted Wizard’s Temple.” Barnum never met an excess he didn’t like, never saw a rainbow whose colors he couldn’t improve.

  Action and distraction, he knew, will trump the still. In the musical based upon his life, Barnum is portrayed as keeping at bay his own and the world’s ennui by spinning off energy and joy. “Through a night as dark as space / And cold as the sea,” he sings, “Someone’s got to make it bright
/ Shoot a rocket, shine a light.” Someone, in short, has to build a fire, distract, and amuse. Exuberance, Barnum knew, is complicated: it may exist on its own or it may keep darker company; it is something people not only want but need.

  Following my talk with Jim Dale, and after having returned to the theater to once again watch him captivate his audience with his electric irrepressibility, I added two songs from Barnum to my clinic lectures about mania and other elated states. Even the doctors who had been on call the night before—usually a study in the ability, shared with horses, to sleep upright, with their eyes giving only the illusion of being open—were tapping their feet. Exuberance, the real thing, is contagious. But why?

  There are many reasons. The rapid and accurate communication of emotion among members of a group is essential if they are to survive. Split-second transfer of fear alerts the group to potential danger and compels a swift, coordinated response. Likewise vital, if less obviously so, the quick dispersal of exuberant or triumphant emotion accelerates the spread of the news of victory, opportunity in the environment, or a new idea. It sends the message that it is time to explore, to gather as a group, to celebrate, to have fun. When there is cause for celebration, or collective enthusiasm and energy are required, infectious fervor will further a swift dissemination. Malcolm Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that behaviors spread as viruses do. Exuberance is a potent vector; it shoots emotion and opportunity into a group just as brisk, high winds carry pollen and seeds into new fields and habitats. Exuberance is a propitious thermal, which first lifts and then ferries energy, enthusiasm, and hope.

  Exuberance draws people together and primes them to act boldly; it warrants that the immediate world is safe for exploration and enjoyment and creates a vivifying climate in which a group can rekindle its collective mental and physical energies if depleted by setback, stress, or aggression. It answers despair with hope: “How I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm,” wrote John Osborne in Look Back in Anger. “Just enthusiasm—that’s all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I’m alive.” By capturing many in its far-flung web, exuberance overrides the inhibition that blocks action or innovation; like other positive emotions, it also enhances learning and fosters communal generosity. Infectious joy pumps life into social bonds and creates new ones through collective celebration and lively exchange. Shared joys rather than shared sufferings make a friend, Nietzsche believed, and there is much truth in this. High spirits beget high spirits; the memory of delight is laid down, the expectation of joy seeded.

  C. S. Lewis laid stress upon our need for close proximity to intense experience: “Good things as well as bad,” he wrote in Mere Christianity, “are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to get wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.… They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.”

  Joy infects. Katharine Graham once said of an editor that “he had fun and he gave it to others.” But how? How does an emotion spread from one person to another? Are some people better able to transmit emotions and, if so, is that because they themselves are more emotional? Psychologists have asked these questions for years. In an early study, conducted in the 1970S, researchers filmed individuals as they viewed slides whose content was highly emotional in nature (photographs of burned bodies, for example, or of laughing children). People whose facial reactions to the pictures were particularly expressive and easy to read were labeled “powerful senders”; those whose faces displayed scant or ambiguous emotional cues, on the other hand, were designated “weak senders.” Further investigation revealed that the powerful senders, those who displayed a rich nonverbal language, scored high on measures of extraversion. The weak senders, in contrast, were far more introverted; their nonspoken language of emotions was barren and tightly held.

  Carl Jung had observed this four decades earlier. When the extravert expresses emotion, Jung wrote, he makes a “visible and convincing appearance” before his public. Although both the extravert and introvert possess enthusiasm, “that which fills the extravert’s heart overflows from his mouth; the introvert’s lips are sealed by the enthusiasm that moves him within.” The introvert, Jung continued, “kindles no flame of enthusiasm in the world around him.… [H]is laconic expression and the mystified lack of comprehension it produces in his public” lead others to doubt that he has anything “extraordinary to say.” The extravert, on the other hand, immediately appears intriguing; his manifest success in life is a “vitalizing and invigorating factor.”

  The psychologist Howard Friedman, of the University of California at Riverside, devised a test to measure individual differences in nonverbal emotional expressiveness. The Affective Communication Test, a thirteen-item self-report scale, contains such items as “I show that I like someone by hugging or touching that person,” “When I hear good dance music, I can hardly keep still,” and “At small parties I am the center of attention.” People who score high on this test tend to be colorful and charismatic, playful, more attractive to others, outgoing, dominant, and able to inspire others to act. (Highly expressive physicians, for example, have more patients than doctors who are less obviously emotional; people who are more expressive are also more likely to be attracted to lives in politics, lecturing, or acting.)

  Expressive individuals strongly influence the moods of those who are unexpressive, but the reverse is not true: unexpressive people have little impact on the emotions of those who are expressive. Psychologists find that more emotional information is conveyed by expressive individuals and that their emotional responses attract greater attention from those around them. Women, although they in general score somewhat lower on measures of extraversion than men, tend to score higher on emotional expressiveness. (It may be that men score higher on characteristics of extraversion, such as impulsiveness, which are not as directly related to expressiveness.)

  The transmission of emotions is rapid. Viewing faces with “happy” or “sad” expressions, for example, quickly evokes those feelings in the viewer. Barbara Wild and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany found that communication of most facially expressed emotions takes place within half a second; the time frame is particularly short if people are looking at “happy” faces. That “happy” faces are registered so swiftly may be partly because happiness, at least as measured by spontaneous facial expression, appears to be the most accurately communicated of the emotions. Psychologists who study the relative communicability of emotions report that happiness is correctly communicated from one individual to another 48 percent of the time. Fear, in contrast, is correctly registered only 10 percent of the time, anger 13 percent, sadness 17 percent, and disgust 23 percent.

  Negative emotions, although less accurately transmitted than positive ones (a strange finding, given the importance of the swift communication of fear), are more contagious; that is, expressive individuals are better able to infect others with negative emotions than with positive ones. This is consistent with recent psychological research, which finds that many types of negative stimuli, such as negative words, are detected faster than positive ones. Experimental subjects more quickly locate an angry face among happy ones than a happy face among angry ones. This is almost certainly because the immediate survival of an individual or a group is dependent upon the threat of danger being quickly recognized and spread among its members.

  Happiness, which is what psychologists have studied rather than joy or exuberance, is a dilute version of these more energetic and communicable states. Nonfacial as well as facial communication of exuberant moods is more obvious than that displayed in the less effusive “happy” ones, and body language and olfactory communication surely play a far more important role than we now appreciate in the transmiss
ion of information, including the nature and intensity of our emotions. We know this is true for other species. Mice, for example, form complex images in their brains about the sex and genetic makeup of other mice on the basis of subtle chemical signals called pheromones. Young male Asian elephants in musth secrete a honeylike odor from their temporal glands, which scientists believe signals youthful and erratic behavior rather than competitive intentions to older males. The temporal-lobe secretions of mature elephants are instead fetid and distinctly different from those excreted by the young males. Being able to correctly distinguish the odors excreted in youth from those of maturity appears to increase harmony between two otherwise potentially competitive groups of elephants. Researchers cite ancient Hindu poetry which speaks of the arrival of bees to “gather sweetness from the temples” of young musth elephants. We do not know that there isn’t a like sweet smell of joy and playfulness in humans.

  The psychologists Elaine Hatfield at the University of Hawaii and John Cacioppo at Ohio State University have been particularly interested in the specific mechanisms responsible for emotional contagion, as well as the psychological characteristics of people who “catch anxiety” or “catch joy.” Evidence is strong that people quickly mimic the physical movements, voices, and facial expressions of those with whom they are in contact and that such “catching” of others’ emotions is a universal human phenomenon. Hatfield developed the Emotional Contagion Scale to measure individual differences in vulnerability to emotional contagion; for example, the susceptibility to “catching” anxiety (“When someone paces back and forth, I feel nervous and anxious”), or joy (“When someone laughs hard, I laugh too”).