University of Oxford

Graduate Student, Experimental Psychology

D.Phil Student

Christ Church

Thesis Title: Affect Transfer: Emotional Contagion, Social Appraisal, and Interpersonal History

About

How do we catch other peoples emotions?

Emotions are fundamentally social things; we are instinctively sensitive and reactive to the emotional behaviour of others. So sensitive in fact that we can actually catch the emotions and moods of the people we spend time with. My doctoral research addressed the question of how emotions transfer between people during interaction. More specifically, do the emotional behaviours of others possess an almost infectious quality that has the capacity to evoke emotional reactions without us even realising? Or do we need to register the meaning of others’ emotional behaviours in order to be affected by them? What influences this interpersonal transfer of affect? 

To explore these questions I undertook two lines of investigation; one experimental and one based on a more naturalistic diary methodology.

In my experimental research I presented participants with specifically constructed video clips which employed a range of manipulations. Typically the video clips depicted targets expressing either positive or negative emotion. Manipulations involved altering the targets’ descriptions of their own emotional state (consistent or inconsistent with their emotional behaviour), altering information regarding the social context (appropriate or inappropriate for the targets emotional behaviour), and providing participants with feedback regarding their similarity to the targets on personality traits and personal values. The aim was to assess the extent to which emotions transferred automatically via automatic contagion, and to assess how appraisals related to the interpersonal and social context regulated the contagion process.

Participants reported how they felt and how they thought the targets were feeling. The results suggested that while emotions did appear to have a contagious quality, the transfer of affect was regulated by participant’s appraisals of the targets emotion, the social context, and how appropriate the targets emotional response was. The research highlighted the importance of meaning in affect transfer casting doubt on the claim that emotions transfer primarily on the basis of unchecked contagious processes.

Does it occur within-groups?

My diary research involved a large-scale study mapping group member’s affective responses over several days, before and after group interaction episodes. The research also assessed the impact of individual-level characteristics such as group identification, emotional expressiveness, susceptibility to emotional contagion and attention to social comparison information on group members’ emotional responses. The results did not provide support for the transfer of affect in newly formed work groups suggesting that a shared interpersonal history is important in the aetiology of group emotion.

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