According to psychologist Dr Lisa Turner, ‘emotional sponging’ is a social phenomenon where one person in a relationship absorbs and internalises the negative emotions of someone close to them.

The paper F. Zhang et al., “Phosphorus sequestration in the form of polyphosphate by microbial symbionts in marine sponges,” PNAS, 112:4381-86, 2015. Dyed surprise Fan Zhang, a graduate student in ...