Emotional contagion
Emotional contagion is a shit of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions in addition to related behaviors. such(a) emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in the larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination relieve oneself any been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.
Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is "a process in which a adult or multinational influences the emotions or behavior of another person or office through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes." One image developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mirror their companions' expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions' emotions.
In a 1993 paper, Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson define emotional contagion as "the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person's [sic] and, consequently, to converge emotionally".: 96
Hatfield, et al., theorize emotional contagion as a two-step process: First, we imitate people e.g., if someone smiles at you, you smile back. Second, our own emotional experiences conform based on the non-verbal signals of emotion that we provide off. For example, smiling authorises one feel happier and frowning creating one feel worse. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people.
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Influencing factors
Several factors build the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group, including membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence, and social interdependence. besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group's members, such(a) as openness to get and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics, and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion.
Research on emotional contagion has been conducted from a bracket of perspectives, including organizational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological. While early research suggested that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for emotional contagion, some forms of more primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and universal.
Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson's 1993 research into emotional contagion proposed that people's conscious assessments of others' feelings were heavily influenced by what others said. People's own emotions, however, were more influenced by others' nonverbal clues as to what they were really feeling. Recognizing emotions and acknowledging their origin can be one way to avoid emotional contagion. Transference of emotions has been studied in a style of situations and settings, with social and physiological causes being two of the largest areas of research.
In addition to the social contexts discussed above, emotional contagion has been studied within organizations. Schrock, Leaf, and Rohr 2008 say organizations, like societies, work emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems, including rules about the feelings workers should, and should not, feel and display. They state that emotion culture is quite similar to "emotion climate", otherwise required as morale, organizational morale, and corporate morale.[]: 46 Furthermore, Worline, Wrzesniewski, and Rafaeli 2002: 318 extension that organizations hit an overall "emotional capability", while McColl-Kennedy, and Smith 2006: 255 discussing "emotional contagion" in client interactions. These terms arguably all attempt to describe a similar phenomenon; used to refer to every one of two or more people or things term differs in subtle and somewhat indistinguishable ways.
A controversial experiment demonstrating emotional contagion by using the social media platform Facebook was carried out in 2012 on 689,000 users by filtering positive or negative emotional content from their news feeds. The experiment sparked uproar among people who felt the discussing violated personal privacy. The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks", a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is refers by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis 2018 as a "disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind." Tony D. Sampson et al. criticize the impression that "academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the security system for human research subjects because they are works with a social media business that has 'no obligation to conform' to the principle of 'obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out'." A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users' timelines.
Beyond the ethical concerns, some scholars criticized the methods and reporting of the Facebook findings. John Grohol, writing for Psych Central, argued that despite its tag and claims of "emotional contagion," this study did non look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. called "Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count" or LIWC 2007 that simply counted positive and negative words in grouping to infer users' sentiments. A shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet "I am not happy" would be scored as positive: "Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers." Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the effect size of the findings are little more than a "statistical blip."
Kramer et al. 2014 found a 0.07%—that's not 7 percent, that's 1/15th of one percent!!—decrease in negative words in people's status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how numerous words you'd have to read or write previously you've written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.