Emotional Contagion

Simulation theories predict that the observation of other's expressions modulates neural activity in the same centers controlling their production. This hypothesis has been developed by two models, postulating that the visual input is directly projected either to the motor system for action recognition (motor resonance) or to emotional/interoceptive regions for emotional contagion and social synchronization (emotional resonance). Here we investigated the role of frontal/insular regions in the processing of observed emotional expressions by combining intracranial recording, electrical stimulation and effective connectivity...

Emotions play a vital role within organizations, impacting various crucial aspects of work such as job satisfaction, performance, and employee well-being. Understanding how emotional states spread in organizational settings is therefore essential. Recent studies have highlighted that a leader's emotional state can influence their followers, with significant consequences on job performance. Leaders thus possess the ability to influence their employees' psychological state and, consequently, their well-being...

The field of developmental psychopathology tends to focus on the negative aspects of functioning. However, prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding - positive aspects of functioning- might relate to some aspects of psychopathology in meaningful ways. In this article, we review research on the relations of three types of developmental psychopathology- externalizing problems (EPs), internalizing problems (IPs), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) - to empathy-related responding (e.g., affective and cognitive empathy, sympathy, personal distress) and prosocial behavior...

OBJECTIVE: To understand the experience of children when they become ill with COVID-19. METHOD: Qualitative-descriptive and exploratory study, guided by the World Health Organization's concept of Quality of Life. Twenty-four children participated, aged between seven and nine years, 11 months and 29 days, diagnosed with COVID-19. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and underwent deductive thematic analysis. RESULTS: The children understood what COVID-19 is, its high lethality and transmissibility, and its forms of contagion and prevention...

We proposed a model where a male employee's wife's engagement in recovery activities results in the husband's own enactment of recovery activities while in the workplace, via emotional contagion, based on the COR theory and broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. We expected wives may experience positive emotions after engaging in social interactions, which has a contagion effect on husbands' positive emotions. Further, husbands were expected to leverage their positive emotions to engage in future recovery activities (better lunch nap and meal quality while at work)...

Experts and laypeople often describe pathogens and diseases by attributing to these nonhuman entities human-related qualities, mind states, intentions, and emotions (i.e., anthropomorphism). By taking advantage of the last pandemic, the present research was intended to investigate the implications of thinking about a virus in human-like terms for individuals' health-related behaviors. A severity pathway hypothesis (i.e., virus anthropomorphism is linked to higher engagement in preventive behaviors via higher perceived threat of the virus) and an effectiveness pathway hypothesis (i...

AIM: This study aimed to assess mental health nurses' empathy towards consumers with dual diagnosis in Australian mental health settings. The research question was What is mental health nurses' empathy towards consumers with co-existing mental health and drug and alcohol problems? DESIGN AND METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was carried out to understand mental health nurses' empathy. The convenience sample included 96 mental health nurses from various mental health settings with experience working with consumers with dual diagnosis...

BACKGROUND: During the confinement, there was an increase in the incidence of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety. In this regard, affectivity is of particular interest, as emotions play a fundamental role in overall mental health. The literature on COVID-19 in this population has often focused on the analysis of risk factors for mental health, while less attention has been paid to protective factors. In this paper, we propose an inclusive model of risk and protective factors for adolescent mental health through the indirect effect of negative and positive affect...

A close relationship between emotional contagion and spontaneous facial mimicry has been theoretically proposed and is supported by empirical data. Facial expressions are essential in terms of both emotional and motor synchrony. Previous studies have demonstrated that trait emotional empathy enhanced spontaneous facial mimicry, but the relationship between autistic traits and spontaneous mimicry remained controversial. Moreover, previous studies presented faces that were static or videotaped, which may lack the "liveliness" of real-life social interactions...

Protective face masks were one of the central measures to counteract viral transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior research indicates that face masks impact various aspects of social cognition, such as emotion recognition and social evaluation. Whether protective masks also influence social avoidance behavior is less clear. Our project assessed direct and indirect measures of social avoidance tendencies towards masked and unmasked faces in two experiments with 311 participants during the first half of 2021...

Affective empathy, the ability to share the emotions of others, is an important contributor to the richness of our emotional experiences. Here, we review evidence that rodents show signs of fear and pain when they witness the fear and pain of others. This emotional contagion creates a vicarious emotion in the witness that mirrors some level of detail of the emotion of the demonstrator, including its valence and the vicinity of threats, and depends on brain regions such as the cingulate, amygdala, and insula that are also at the core of human empathy...

INTRODUCTION: During the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing personnel presented a higher prevalence of fear of contagion, anxiety symptoms, depression, and burnout syndrome. However, the variables associated with these conditions in Mexico are unknown. OBJECTIVE: To determine the clinical, sociodemographic, and psychological variables associated with fear of contracting COVID-19 and burnout syndrome in nursing personnel. METHODS: The study was a cross-sectional correlational study...

The impact of COVID-19 has led to a substantial economic and psychosocial burden on the Latinx population. However, few studies have evaluated how COVID-19 symptoms may exacerbate suicide risk indicators among Latinx persons, or the particular social determinants of health facilitating such detrimental effects. The present study examined the association between self-reported COVID-19 symptoms and suicide likelihood (i.e., self-reported perceived likelihood that one will attempt suicide in the future) among Latinx individuals within a timeframe involving high COVID-19 contagion before the onset of vaccine dissemination...

Empathy helps us navigate social interactions and promotes prosocial behaviors like caregiving and helping. Here, we explored whether awe, a key self-transcendent and epistemic emotion, could encourage greater empathy across seven diverse student and community samples collected between 2020 and 2022. Empathy is a multifaceted construct; thus, we assessed performance on a range of empathy measures including perspective taking accuracy (Study 2), empathic accuracy (Study 3; preregistered), emotion contagion and compassion (Study 4)...

The study aimed to explore how interpersonal closeness (friends vs. strangers) and emotion type (positive vs. negative) influenced emotion contagion and physiological synchrony between interacting partners. Twenty-eight friend dyads (n = 56) and 29 stranger dyads (n = 58) participated in an emotion contagion laboratory task. In each dyad, one participant, the 'sender', was randomly asked to watch a film clip (neutral, positive, or negative), while their partner, the 'observer' passively observed the sender's facial expressions...

During public health crises, the investigation into the modes of public emotional contagion assumes paramount theoretical importance and has significant implications for refining epidemic strategies. Prior research predominantly emphasized the antecedents and aftermath of emotions, especially those of a negative nature. The interplay between positive and negative emotions, as well as their role in the propagation of emotional contagion, remains largely unexplored. In response to this gap, an emotional contagion model was developed, built upon the foundational model and enriched from a complex network standpoint by integrating a degradation rate index...

INTRODUCTION: This study delves into the intricacies of emotional contagion and its impact on performance within dyadic interactions. Specifically, it focuses on the context of stereotype-based stress (SBS) during collaborative problem-solving tasks among female pairs. Through an exploration of emotional contagion, this study seeks to unveil its underlying mechanisms and effects. METHODS: Leveraging EEG-based hyperscanning technology, we introduced an innovative approach known as the functional graph contrastive learning (fGCL), which extracts subject-invariant representations of neural activity patterns from feedback trials...

Research examining how crowd emotions impact observers usually requires participants to engage in an atypical mental process whereby (static) arrays of individuals are cognitively integrated to represent a crowd. The present work sought to extend our understanding of how crowd emotions may spread to individuals by assessing self-reported emotions, attention and muscle movement in response to emotions of dynamic, virtually modeled crowd stimuli. Self-reported emotions and attention from thirty-six participants were assessed when foreground and background crowd characters exhibited homogeneous (Study 1) or heterogeneous (Study 2) positive, neutral, or negative emotions...

Charisma, the captivating attribute that endows an individual with the power to inspire and influence others, is frequently associated with possessing an attractive personality, effective communication skills, and the capacity to draw people in and lead them. The concept of the trickle-down effect in leadership theory suggests that the characteristics of a leader's style including perceptions, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, have the potential to be "contagious" and spread to their followers. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether and when a leader's charisma may be transferred to followers, as charisma is predominantly a trait associated with the leader...

Although previous studies have found a bidirectional relationship between emotional contagion and reward, there is insufficient research to prove the effect of reward on the social function of emotional contagion. To explore this issue, the current study used electroencephalography (EEG) and the interactive way in which the expresser played games to help participants obtain reward outcomes. The results demonstrated a significant correlation between changes in emotional contagion and closeness, indicating that emotional contagion has a social regulatory function...