Emotional Contagion

Abstract

People's emotional experiences and facial expressions tend to reflect rudimentary features of the changes in emotional expression of those they observe; such a process forms an important part of social interaction that allows people to understand and share the feelings of others. This facial mimicry is called emotional contagion (EC). Schoenewolf defines emotional contagion as the flow of emotions from one person to another, with the receiver “catching” the emotions that the sender displays. Management studies tend to focus on the related but more cognitive, sophisticated, and socially beneficial process of empathy and sympathy and examine the influence of EC in organizational setting, in particular, between service providers and customers. Researchers in services marketing investigate the reciprocal relationship between service employees and customers in the services encounters through the understanding of EC and the concept of emotional labor. Hatfield et al . proposed that individuals have different levels of susceptibility to EC and ability to transmit their emotions onto others. Subsequent researches established unidimensional as well as multifaceted emotional contagion scales to measure the susceptibility of EC.