Emotional Contagion Explained: What Is Emotional Contagion?

Emotional contagion is a condition observed in psychological science where similar emotional responses quickly spread among a group of people. Social psychology has long established that an individual's behavior can heavily influence the behaviors of others around them and vice versa. A person’s choice of words, facial feedback, body language, and sense of energy can all prompt emotional changes in those around them—from family members to colleagues to total strangers.

For over a century, the neuroscience community has examined the concept of emotional contagion as a byproduct of social interaction. The key concepts of emotional contagion as we understand it today have been cultivated by a few researchers working in this space.

• Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson: The team of Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson published a 1993 paper on the topic in Current Directions in Psychological Science. They describe emotional contagion as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person’s and, consequently, to converge emotionally.” The team’s research also appeared in Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, which Cambridge University Press published in 1994.
• Vittorio Gallese: Italian researcher Vittorio Gallese traces emotional contagion to mirror neurons in the brain’s premotor cortex, arguing that emotional contagion occurs at a subconscious level. In a 2004 paper titled “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition,” published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Gallese and colleagues write “the fundamental mechanism that allows us a direct experiential grasp of the mind of others is not conceptual reasoning but direct simulation of the observed events through the mirror mechanism.”

Examples of emotional contagion abound in our everyday lives. Imagine coming home from work in a bad mood. You’ve had a terrible day at the office, and you’re bitter and filled with self-pity. Yet when you get home, your significant other opens the door with a joyful facial expression. You go inside to see a couple of friends hanging out in the house. Their body language is fun and bubbly, and after a few minutes of being around them, your mood begins to lighten.

As time passes, your bitterness melts away and you begin to relax and enjoy yourself. You have just experienced a form of primitive emotional contagion as you gradually assimilated to reflect the upbeat emotional experiences of those around you.

Emotional contagion helps explain the ways that nonverbal cues and social mimicry can affect perceptions of well-being, outlooks on life, and decision making. People with strong emotional intelligence—those who can easily pick up on the emotional expressions of others—may show greater susceptibility to emotional contagion. This cuts in both ways: Positive emotional contagion can engender positive emotions in such people, while negative social contagion can engender negative emotions.

In recent years, researchers have turned their focus to social media—already known for spurring mass social comparison—to explore whether exposure to certain content can trigger the process of emotional contagion. In a 2014 paper titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory, and Jeffrey Hancock found a slight correlation between negative words in a social media user’s newsfeed and their tendency to write negative posts of their own. Other researchers have argued that the demonstrated correlation was far too minor to pin the social media platform for the activation of emotional contagion and that more research is needed.

There are two types of emotional contagion: implicit and explicit.

1. 1. Implicit emotional contagion: Implicit emotional contagion exists on a subconscious level. People experiencing this social phenomenon may take cues from other people’s facial expressions, body language, choice of words, and nonverbal stimuli, yet they are not consciously doing so. Conversely, people may steer others’ emotions due to their own behavior, gestures, and moods, but they do not do so intentionally.
2. 2. Explicit emotional contagion: Explicit emotional contagion refers to the conscious act of shaping one’s own emotions to prompt similar emotions in other people. An example of emotional contagion would be a salesman affecting an air of wonder and enthusiasm to trigger wonder and enthusiasm among other people in the same room. A fear-mongering cable news host might project a sense of their own fear and trepidation to prompt similar feelings in their audience at home. Explicit emotional contagion can also occur one-on-one, such as when a friend laughs and tells jokes to cheer up a friend in a bad mood.

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