Emotional contagion

In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines—anthropology, neuroscience, biology, social psychology, sociology, life-span psychology, and history—have proposed that the process of primitive emotional contagion is critically important in understanding cognition, emotion, and behavior. Primitive emotional contagion appears to be a basic building block of human interaction—assisting in “mind-reading,” allowing people to understand and to share the feelings of others, as well as coordinate and synchronize their activities with others.

Most social psychologists agree that emotional “packages” comprise many components—including conscious awareness; facial, vocal, and postural expression; neurophysiological and autonomic nervous system activity; and instrumental behaviors. Different portions of the brain process the various aspects of emotion. Yet—because the brain integrates the emotional information it receives—each of the emotional components acts on and is acted upon by the others.

In the 1990s, Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues defined primitive emotional contagion as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person's and, consequently, to converge emotionally.”

The Emotional Contagion Scale (ECS) is designed to assess people's susceptibility to catching joy and happiness, love, fear and anxiety, anger, and sadness and depression, as well as emotions in general. The ECS has been translated into a variety of languages—including Finnish, German, Greek, Telugu, Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish.

Personality theorists who have administered this scale in a variety of cultures have discovered that there are cultural, personality, gender, and situational differences in people's susceptibility to emotional contagion. People are most likely to catch others' emotions in two kinds of relationships—those involving love or power. We are particularly susceptible to contagion in the company of those we like and love and those who possess power over us.

According to scholars, contagion may occur in a number of ways. At first, scholars took it for granted that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for the ubiquitous phenomenon. Recently, however, social psychologists have concluded that primitive emotional contagion is a far more subtle, automatic, and ubiquitous process than once thought. This entry describes the mechanisms of emotional contagion and the implications of existing research.