Emotional contagion: what is it and how does it affect relationships with others?

Emotional contagion is a psychological phenomenon that is exploited by large companies.

We have all experienced at one time or another the feeling of sharing the same emotion as the people around us.

Let's try to better understand what causes this psychological mechanism known as contagion. this psychological mechanism known as emotional contagionWhat is its evolutionary usefulness and how does it affect us in our daily lives? We will also explore some of the experiments that have been done in this regard to know this phenomenon.

What is emotional contagion?

Emotional contagion is a psychological quality by which individuals tend to share the same emotions. individuals tend to share the same emotions that people around them are experiencing.. This phenomenon is not only limited to the emotions themselves, but also to the behaviors derived from them, so we could also observe how certain behaviors are also easily spread between people.

Moreover, emotional contagion is a mechanism that, although it is particularly prominent in humans, is not limited exclusively to this species. Tests have shown that other animals, such as some types of primates, but also others much more distant from us genetically, such as dogs, can sometimes use emotional contagion as a means of transmitting emotions.

This phenomenon is of crucial importance for our social relationships, as it is an automatic method of tuning into each other. is an automatic method of tuning in to other people's feelings.. It is important to keep in mind that emotional contagion can occur both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, we can experience that attunement in emotions by mere observation of another person, but it is not the only way.

It is also possible to experience such attunement in a more conscious way, in which the other individual exposes what he or she feels in order to try to transmit it to the other person, who picks it up and integrates it as an emotion of his or her own as a result of this mechanism, thus favoring directed emotional contagion.

History of the concept of emotional contagion

Emotional contagion is a concept first put forward in 1993, following a study conducted by Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson.. This group of psychologists used this expression to refer to an observed psychological phenomenon consisting of the human tendency to synchronize behaviors with the person with whom they are communicating.

In this sense, they found that the people studied seemed to adopt a body posture similar to that of their interlocutor, used a similar tone of voice and even adjusted their expressions to those of the other person. But the most important thing is that all this led to a harmony in the emotions of both, which led them to use the expression of emotional contagion.

These authors tried to explain this phenomenon through a two-phase sequence. At first, it seems that synchronization has more to do with the behavioral part. For example, a person can make a certain gesture, such as smiling, and the most immediate effect on the interlocutor will be to replicate that behavior.

But After this initial behavioral matching, however, comes emotional convergence.The emotional convergence, since our own behavior, in this case non-verbal language, would also be guiding the emotion. It has been demonstrated that performing gestures associated with a certain emotional state predisposes us to experience that state. For example, smiling makes us feel happy.

Therefore, it seems that one of the bases of emotional contagion is precisely that previous behavioral contagion that seems to trigger the reaction of our feelings once we have tuned our behavior to that of the other person who is communicating with us.

Differences between emotional contagion and empathy

Surely the reader has already anticipated that emotional contagion seems to have a great similarity with the concept of empathy, which also implies a synchrony of feelings between people. Indeed, they have similar qualities in many respects, but in reality they are two different phenomena.

In order to distinguish between them, we must resort to the characteristic of the autonomy of emotion. Autonomy is a condition that occurs in empathy, but not in emotional contagion. This quality would refer to the capacity of the person experiencing this phenomenon to distinguish his or her own experience of the emotion from that of the other person.

Therefore, when we experience empathy, what we are doing is putting ourselves in the other person's place, knowing the extent of their emotions and therefore being aware of what is going on inside them. On the contrary, emotional contagion is an automatic process in which, as we have already seen, an automatic synchronization happens in us with the behavior and emotions of another individual.

Facebook experiment

In 2012, the social network Facebook conducted a rather controversial experiment, in which the effect of emotional contagion came to light. What they did was to manipulate in a very subtle way the publications that several hundred thousand of their users saw on their walls. The objective was that a part of these users would be exposed to a particular type of content, while the other group would see the opposite..

Where did they make the difference? In the emotional tinge of those posts. Therefore, they manipulated the algorithm so that half of this group of users would be more exposed to the publications they usually saw, but only of a positive nature, omitting the negative ones. With the other half, the opposite was done, favoring the viewing of emotionally negative posts and trying to avoid those that were more positive.

What did Facebook want to prove with this experiment? Basically, that emotional contagion exists and that it does not only work in person, but the phenomenon is just as powerful when it occurs digitally.. They proved that their hypothesis was correct by analyzing the publications that these users made after being subjected to a biased viewing, without their knowledge.

In this way, people who saw positive content showed a greater tendency to make publications along the same lines, while the other group did as expected. Those who were exposed to emotionally negative content, through a process of emotional contagion, in this case digital, subsequently published content with an equally negative tinge.

The controversy arose from the knowledge that, in some way, Facebook was deliberately trying to manipulate the emotional state of some users and also their behavior, as it was shown that they created certain publications depending on the direction in which they had been pushed, without their knowledge.

Of course, not informing users that they were being part of a study was also a flagrant breach of ethics. Although the company claimed that by accepting the rules prior to the creation of the account, everyone should have been aware that this type of study could be carried out, the truth is that they should have informed them explicitly, asking for consent from all participants.

Likewise, this experiment raised many concerns regarding the The danger that companies as powerful and with as many users as Facebook could take advantage of the emotional contagion to modify people's thoughts and even make a commercial and even political profit from it. to modify people's thoughts and even make a commercial and even political profit out of it.

Meta-analysis with rodents

We already anticipated at the beginning that humans are not the only animals that make use of emotional contagion. We will now analyze a meta-analysis that was carried out in 2020 to determine this effect in different studies with rats and mice, to find out the similarities and differences between the two species in this regard.

The main conclusions reached by this meta-analysis were, firstly, that both mice and rats were able to demonstrate the use of emotional contagion, at a similar level. It was also found that this effect took place whether the other individual was known to the subject or whether it was the first time interacting with him or her..

One of the main differences found came from the variable of previous experience. In the case of rats, if they had previously experienced the sensation of fear due to a given stimulus, they were more likely to show emotional contagion or to do so with greater intensity. However, this effect was not found in the mouse samples.

The last of the major findings of this meta-analysis had to do with the social test factor. When this variable was involved, different levels of emotional contagion were found in both mice and rats.

Bibliographical references:

• Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J.T., Rapson, R.L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences.
• Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E., Hancock, J.T.. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Princeton University.
• Hernandez-Lallement, J., Gómez-Sotres, Paula, Carrillo, M. (2020). Towards a unified theory of emotional contagion in rodents—A meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.