Interpersonal Emotion Transfer: Contagion and Social Appraisal

Abstract

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.

Automatic integration of social information in emotion recognition.

“…Evidence collected by developmental psychologists on the socalled social referencing process even supports the idea that such integration of socioaffective information could operate without strong executive control: Children as young as a year old are able to perform social referencing (i.e., use facial expressions of others to appraise situations that are uncertain or ambiguous, such as crossing a visual cliff) without concurrent explicit reasoning pro cesses being evident (e.g., Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde, & Svejda, 1983; see Parkinson, 2011 This work was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research for the Affective Sciences, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant 51NF40-104897, and hosted by the University of Geneva. We thank Vanessa Maendly and Elena Rossi for their contri butions to data acquisition.…”

Measuring physiological influence in dyads: A guide to designing, implementing, and analyzing dyadic physiological studies.

“…Models of physiological and emotional convergence posit that one way close relationship partners become physiologically and emotionally linked is via shared appraisals (Anderson, Keltner, & John, 2003;Parkinson, 2011). For instance, a mother who fears dogs may teach her child to fear dogs.…”

Worry spreads: Interpersonal transfer of problem-related anxiety

“…In this paper, we sketch out a provisional account of processes that might explain why worry spreads from one person to another (interpersonal anxiety transfer), drawing on research into social appraisal and emotion contagion (see Parkinson, 2011). We also speculate about the under-investigated process of empathic worry, including a phenomenon that we refer to as ''interpersonal meta-worry'': worrying about someone else's worries.…”