An interesting aspect of emotions is that they are contagious. Picture yourself in a meeting. A dominant person who talks more than others sets the scene emotionally, and those who are naturally passive follow. This is why if you feel the atmosphere is going towards an unsuitable direction, you need to take steps to change the emotional atmosphere by taking an initiative or silencing the dominant person (though this may not always be as straight forward as you like).

People also use physical synchronisation between each other, effectively matching each other’s physical posture, non-verbal signals and emotions; the closer the physical synchrony, the stronger the feeling.

We value emotions and emotional readings so much that we tend to apply it to everything as this observation suggests. When you are not very verbally effective while talking to others and perhaps miss the chance to match their mood with the right words, people might simply classify you as someone who is not well-educated or well-informed to be able to use more sophisticated words.

When you are not good non-verbally, you simply come as strange even freaky and people tend to avoid you. A lot of this may happen unconsciously, in other words the other person may not even know what you have done wrong, just that whatever you did, didn’t quite fit the norm they expected. This also explains why foreigners are usually looked at unfavourably, since their behaviour is registered as odd and the native country citizens may simply find it difficult to establish rapport with them due to mismatch between expressing emotions.