In 1518 in France, hundreds of people danced wildly without stopping for days on end; many died from extreme exhaustion or strokes caused by this “dancing plague.” In 1962 in Tanganyika (an East African country now known as Tanzania), a group of students at an all-girls boarding school began laughing and crying uncontrollably for a long period of time; the school had to be closed for a while due to this “laughter epidemic”. Just seven years ago, in 2012, eighteen typical New York teenagers suddenly began developing motor (physical) and vocal tics, very similar to the symptoms of Tourette's syndrome. What was happening to all these people? In these three famous cases, they were experiencing a curious phenomenon known as mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. In their textbook Social Psychology, David G. Myers and Jean M. Twenge define it as the “suggestibility to problems that spreads across a large group of people.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe most commonly used explanation of mass hysteria is that it is the result of “physiological symptoms affecting the nervous system in the absence of a physical cause” of illness and that it may occur in reaction to psychological distress.” In other words, it is psychological stress converted into physiological (bodily) symptoms which, in turn, can manifest in physical behavior. This is known as conversion disorder. Anyone can suffer from conversion disorder, but when many people suffer from it at the same time, then it can be called mass hysteria. The phenomenon usually begins with one or more people behaving in a certain way. So, for it to be considered hysteria, the behavior must be observed and imitated by a fairly large number of people. a growing number of observers joined them. The laughter epidemic began with three giggling female students and soon spread to many other students. When a cheerleader named Katie Krautwurst woke up from a nap with spasms and twitches and then shared her experiences on YouTube, the other seventeen girls followed suit. Furthermore, those affected must live or be present in the same area. Dancers frolicked together in the streets of Strasbourg, France; girls at a boarding school in Kashasha, Tanganyika, laughed while girls at Le Roy Junior-Senior High School in New York ticked away. (While anyone is susceptible to falling into it, for some reason young women especially are; the Tanganyika girls and Le Roy are just two good examples. This may be because, according to Benjamin Radford of Live Science, the Mass hysteria “spreads through societal social bonds and females tend to have stronger social bonds than males.”) This is how mass hysteria happens, but why does it happen? Why would a group of people start dancing, laughing, or ticking just because they saw one person do it? Most likely all of this has to do with the anxieties and worries of a given time and place. In the Holy Roman Empire during the 16th century there were rampant famines and diseases; this, combined with the popular superstitious belief that the Catholic St. Vitus could curse people with dancing plagues “may have triggered a stress-induced hysteria that gripped much of the city of Strasbourg, France in 1518.” After Tanganyika became an independent republic in 1961, just a year before the outbreak, “female students may have [felt uncomfortable with] the unusual expectations imposed in schools.