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In this paper, I question the assumption that emotions are first and foremost individual reactions, and suggest instead that they are often best viewed as social phenomena. I show that many of the causes of emotions are interpersonally, institutionally or culturally defined; that emotions usually have consequences for other people; and that they serve interpersonal as well as cultural functions in everyday life. Furthermore, many cases of emotion are essentially communicative rather than internal and reactive phenomena. Previous research has often underestimated the importance of social factors in the causation and constitution of emotion. In conclusion, I recommend that existing cognitive and physiological approaches to emotional phenomena be supplemented or supplanted by social psychological analysis.

This article addresses the debate between emotion-expression and motive-communication approaches to facial movements, focusing on Ekman's (1972) and Fridlund's (1994) contrasting models and their historical antecedents. Available evidence suggests that the presence of others either reduces or increases facial responses, depending on the quality and strength of the emotional manipulation and on the nature of the relationship between interactants. Although both display rules and social motives provide viable explanations of audience "inhibition" effects, some audience facilitation effects are less easily accommodated within an emotion-expression perspective. In particular, emotion is not a sufficient condition for a corresponding "expression," even discounting explicit regulation, and, apparently, "spontaneous" facial movements may be facilitated by the presence of others. Further, there is no direct evidence that any particular facial movement provides an unambiguous expression of a specific emotion. However, information communicated by facial movements is not necessarily extrinsic to emotion. Facial movements not only transmit emotion-relevant information but also contribute to ongoing processes of emotional action in accordance with pragmatic theories.

Exposure to someone else's emotion can lead us to experience similar feelings. This paper considers two processes (emotion contagion and social appraisal) that may contribute to interpersonal emotion transfer (IET) effects of this kind. Research shows that people automatically mimic other people's perceived movements including their emotion expressions. However, IET does not seem to depend directly on mimicry, suggesting that other processes underlie contagion. Social appraisal is supported by studies showing that IET may depend on changes in explicit interpretations and evaluations of events, as well as implicitly registered cues relating to the direction of attention. Future research needs to focus more on the object-focus of emotion expressions and their contextual meaning in order to explain the variety of reported IET effects.Although it is tempting to think of emotions as personal, subjective, and private, they often affect other people too. We can make others happier or more excited by behaving joyfully, just as we can upset someone else by getting upset ourselves. Emotions have a tendency to spread to those close to us. This review focuses on such interpersonal emotion transfer (IET) effects, and evaluates two of the most influential accounts of their operation: emotion contagion and social appraisal. These two processes are best defined by comparing them with each other.Social appraisal happens when someone else's emotion changes our interpretation or evaluation of what is happening (appraisal, Lazarus, 1991), making us feel about it more like the other person does. For example, we may become more anxious about something when someone else's apparent anxiety makes it seem more worrying than we had realised (e.g., Parkinson & Simons, 2009). By contrast, emotion contagion depends on more direct mirroring or mimicry processes operating independent of any implications of the other person's emotion for event appraisal. For example, we might simply find ourselves feeling happier after interacting with a happy person. In contagion, then, emotions converge automatically when people are together. Both processes may explain IET, but it is sometimes difficult to say which explanation is the correct one. Emotion ContagionThe disease metaphor behind the concept of emotion contagion suggests that simply being in contact with another person puts you in a similar condition. You catch their mood rather than their illness. Obviously, this cannot be due to microbial transmission, so a key question concerns how emotion exerts contagious effects. If we take the metaphor seriously, contagion operates without us willing it, and by some mechanism of which we are not directly aware.

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