What Is Emotional Contagion Theory? (Definition & Examples)

Emotional contagion occurs when someone’s emotions and related behaviors lead to similar emotions and behaviors in others. This article describes the processes involved in emotional contagion and discusses how this common and powerful phenomenon might be positively channeled. Before you continue, we thought you might like to download some of our Emotional Intelligence Exercises.

What Is Emotional Contagion?

By mimicking others’ facial expressions, we can tap into how they are feeling and experience similar emotions ourselves

• We are then susceptible to behaving one way or another, based on these emotions
• Emotional contagion can be negative or positive
• When people are stirred to anger and violent acts by a demagogue, that would be an example of negative emotional contagion
• On the other hand, when a corporate leader frequently smiles, is generally kind and positive toward employees, and inspires positive feelings throughout the workforce, this would be a example of positive emotion contagion

Emotional Contagion and Empathy

Emotional contagion tends to connect and even fuse us with others in ways that can cause “losing ourselves” to others and their emotional tone

• To be empathic, one needs to walk in another’s shoes, feel their predicament, and keep the autonomy needed to relate to and potentially help that other person
• There can be a fine line between empathy and emotional contagion

The Powerful Role of Social Media in Contagion

Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014) explored whether emotional contagion can occur without in-person contact, through social media platforms

• In a large scale study of 689,003 subjects, they found that reductions in positive newsfeed items were associated with fewer positive and more negative posts by participants
• The opposite pattern occurred when negative newsfeed item were reduced
• Taken together, the above findings suggest that we should consider the possible outcomes of either negative or positive emotional contagions in social media, and act accordingly

How the magic of kindness helped me survive the Holocaust

Werner Reich (2019) describes how an act of kindness from one man during his darkest hours as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp sustained him through that time, and beyond.

• This was a powerful form of emotional contagion that Reich now shares with others through his magic act and public talks.

Behind the Theory: 6 Research Findings

Emotional contagion originates in person-to-person contact and mimicry

• Research has found that mimicry comes naturally to humans and other social creatures based partly on the existence of “mirror neurons” in our cerebral cortex
• Mirror neurons were first discovered in the 1990s
• The same neurons in monkey brains fired when a monkey grabbed an object as when they watched another monkey grab the object (Ferrari & Rizzolatti, 2014).
• Similar mirroring processes occur between humans

The Social Animal

Recent research in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology points to a new and more accurate conception of human nature

Real-Life Examples of Emotional Contagion

There are many examples of negative emotional contagion throughout history, especially involving crowds.

• The Paris Commune was a short-lived, violent revolutionary movement that pitted Parisians against French in rural areas during the French Civil War (1871-71).
• In Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds (1895), he wrote that a similar close-contact spread of emotions could be just as powerful and consequential as microbial contagion, although microbial is “linear” in nature whereas emotional is “dialogic.”

Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

Lee Daniel Kravetz

• The author attempts to explain the kind of emotional and behavioral contagion that led to a series of suicides among teens in a prosperous Silicon Valley community.

Relevant Resources

The Emotional Wellness Quiz can help you assess your emotional states day by day and consider the steps you might take to improve your overall emotional wellbeing

• 17 Emotional Intelligence Exercises
• This collection contains 17 validated EI tools for practitioners to use to help others understand and use their emotions to their advantage

A Take-Home Message

We can slow or even reverse the spread of negative contagious emotions and replace them with more positive and adaptive emotional spread by increasing awareness of our emotions and questioning their basis.

• To do this, we must limit our exposure to often negative newsfeeds and threads on social media and create more positive output ourselves, such as Patton Oswalt changing a Twitter troll into a grateful and more reflective person.

A Note on Emotional Contagion in the Workplace

Leaders in organizations spread emotions more powerfully than those under them

• Negative emotions are most contagious
• The antidote is spreading positive emotional states
• Notice how you feel about your workplace, your boss, and your coworkers
• Make behavioral adjustments
• Be a positive emotional booster

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

In this early classic of social psychology, MacKay writes of how extreme, contagious emotions such as mania and rage are the basis of irrational crowd behaviors such as foolish investing in financial scams, impulsive waging of disastrous wars, witch hunts, and lynching.

Emotional Contagion: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction (1994) by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson

“Primitive emotional contagion”: “The process by which others’ expressed emotions through facial expressions, vocal tone, and gestures create similar emotions in ourselves.”

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