As per Google:
vibe
- a person’s emotional state or the atmosphere of a place as communicated to and felt by others.
“we’ve been picking up some bad vibes on that guy”
Our ability to pick up on other’s emotions is wonderful. At a glance we know how others feel through a combination of their smile, eyes, posture, clothing, tone of voice, hair, pupil size, talking speed, smell, and so on, and so on. We are so good, that even when a friend tries to hide their sadness we pick up on their subtle and nuanced changes and realise their vibe is changed.
As a psychological term:
vibe
- the combination of obvious and subtle cues that tell us about others’ emotional state.
note*
You may have noticed something missing from my reworking of the definition. That is the person’s emotions being “felt by others”.
I think in psychology it’s important to leave this out as a requirement. Although we will undoubtedly mirror others’ vibes, it may be more useful to understand their emotional states without this. No need to get angry at someone already frustrated.
But we are not always right in our judgement of other’s emotions. We are not mind readers after all. Some of us are better than others at noticing vibes, but I see no reason why this should be exclusive to the “socially aware”. The ability to read other’s body language is a skill that is learned through experience and practice.
There are two big problems I foresee here.
- We can pick up on vibes involuntarily, so it can be difficult to identify which physiological changes we notice and use in our assessment. So we need to break down this process and learn what each can tell us about others.
- Where do we practice? It’s awkward to ask someone to be your guinea pig and it can be equally so to covertly analyse your friends while chatting over lunch. I’m still working on this one, but for the time being, I’ve been asking friends and family to be said guinea pigs.
as I explore how to read body language, I’ll go into greater depth and link it here