--- title: Study: Stress Is Contagious description: A new study found that even watching stressed people can make you stressed canonical: https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/ author: Laura Stampler article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-05-01T15:02:57.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:55:13.157Z article:section: Health og:title: Science says even watching stressed people can make you stressed og:description: A new study found that even watching stressed people can make you stressed og:url: https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Science says even watching stressed people can make you stressed twitter:description: A new study found that even watching stressed people can make you stressed twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Science Says Stress Is Contagious > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. by [Laura Stampler](https://time.com/author/laura-stampler/) ## Laura Stampler May 1, 2014 3:02 PM UTC by [Laura Stampler](https://time.com/author/laura-stampler/) ## Laura Stampler May 1, 2014 3:02 PM UTC See someone yawn on the subway, and you know there’s a pretty high probability that you’re going to be yawning. [But new research says that there’s another contagion](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub%5Freleases/2014-04/m-ysi043014.php) out there that you can catch just through simple observation: Stress. A study from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Technische Universität Dresden found that even being around a stressed person, be it a loved one or a stranger, has the power to make a someone stressed in a physically quantifiable way. “The fact that we could actually measure this empathic stress in the form of a significant hormone release was astonishing,” said Veronika Engert, one of the study’s authors. During the study, test subjects paired with loved ones and strangers of the opposite sex and then divided into two groups. One group was given challenging arithmetic questions and interviewed in order to induce direct stress. The group of [211 observers](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453014001243) simply watched the test and interviews through a one-way mirror and via video transmissions. As expected, 95% of the people placed under direct stress showed signs of, well, stress. But 26% of observers had an increase in cortisol as well as a result of empathic stress. The impact of stress was particularly high when a subject was observing a romantic partner in a stressful situation (40%) but it applied to strangers as well (10%). When observers watched stressful events through a one-way mirror, 30% experienced a stressful response. Another 24% percent of observers were stressed when they watched the events unfold on video. Lesson learned: be careful when you’re watching _Breaking Bad_ re-runs. “Even television programs depicting the suffering of other people can transmit that stress to viewers,” Engert said. “Stress has an enormous contagion potential.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/"},"headline":"Science Says Stress Is Contagious","datePublished":"2014-05-01T15:02:57.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:55:13.157Z","description":"A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Technische Universität Dresden finds that stress can be super contagious: not only can being around a stressed person physically stress you out, but so can watching certain videos","url":"https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/","keywords":["Research","Living","Anxiety","Stress","Mental Health/Psychology"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Laura Stampler","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/laura-stampler/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/research/","name":"Research"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/84080/stress-contagious/","name":"Science Says Stress Is Contagious"}}]}] ```