EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
Elaine Hatfield
University of Hawaii
滑板兔
John T. Cacioppo
Ohio State University
and
Richard L. Rapson
University of Hawaii
境遇的意思BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
Elaine Hatfield is a Professor of Psychology and Richard L. Rapson is a Professor of History at the University of Hawaii. John Cacioppo is a Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University. Address correspondence to Elaine Hatfield, 2430 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI, 96822. Telephone num
bers: Home: (808) 988-7679. Work: (808) 956-6276. FAX (808) 956-4700. BITNET:
psych@uhunix. INTERNET: psych@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu.
streakHatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. L. & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, 2, 96-99.
EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
Emotions have ubiquitous effects in human affairs. Vivian Gornick (1987), in Fierce Attachments, recounts a typical exchange with her mother. Gornick always begins the encounters with high hopes. “Somehow,” in spite of her best intentions, their conversations always spiral downward:
Today is promising, tremendously promising. . . .
I go to meet my mother. I'm flying. Flying! I want to give her
some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my
immen happiness at being alive. Just becau she is my oldest
intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.
“Oh, Ma! What a day I've had,” I say.
feverish
“Tell me,” she says. “Do you have the rent this month?”
“Ma, listen . . .” I say.
“That review you wrote for the Times,” she says. “It's for sure they'll pay you?”
“Ma, stop it. Let me tell you what I've been feeling,” I say.
sable
“Why aren't you wearing something warmer?” she cries. “It's nearly winter.”
The space inside begins to shimmer. The walls collap inward. I feel breathless. Swallow slowly, I say to mylf, slowly.暗示是什么意思
To my mother I say, “You do know how to say the right thing at the
right time. It's remarkable, this gift of yours. It quite takes my
breath away.”
But she doesn't get it. She doesn't know I'm being ironic.
Nor does she know she's wiping me out. She doesn't know I take
her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can
she know this? She doesn't even know I'm there. Were I to tell her
purpofulthat it's death to me, her not knowing I'm there, she would stare at
arm是什么意思中文me out of her eyes crowding up with puzzled desolation, this young
girl of venty-ven, and she would cry angrily, “You don't
understand! You have never understood!” (pp. 103-104).
Gornick is fiercely attached to her mother; she cannot resist “catching” her anxiety and depression.
Recently, we have begun to explore this process of emotional contagion. People em to be fully aware that conscious asssments can provide a great
deal of information about others. They em to be less aware that they can gain even more information by focusing-in now and then on their own emotional reactions during tho social encounters. As people nonconsciously and automatically mimic their companions' fleeting expressions of emotion, they often come to feel pale reflections of their partners' feelings. By attending to this stream of tiny moment-to-moment reactions, people can and do “feel themlves into” the emotional landscapes inhabited by their partners.服装制图软件
Let us begin by defining “emotional contagion” and discussing veral mechanisms that we believe might account for this phenomenon. [We will provide evidence that people tend: (a) to mimic the facial expressions, vocal expressions, postures, and instrumental behaviors of tho around them, and thereby; (b) to “catch” others' emotions as a conquence of such facial, vocal, and postural feedback. We will end by reviewing the evidence from a variety of disciplines that such primitive emotional contagion exists.] Emotional contagion may well be important in personal relationships becau it fosters behavioral synchrony and the tracking of the feelings of others moment-to-moment even when individuals are not explicitly attending to this information.
DEFINITIONS
Theorists disagree as to what constitutes an emotion family. Most, however, probably would agree that emotional “packages” are comprid of many components--including conscious awareness; facial, vocal, and postural expression; neurophysiological and autonomic nervous system activity; and instrumental behaviors.1 Since the brain integrates the emotional information it receives; each of the emotional components acts on and is acted upon by the others.
emotional contagion is defined as:
Primitive
wald
The tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions,
vocalizations, postures, and movements with tho of another
person's and, conquently, to converge emotionally (p.153-154).2
As early as 1759, the economic philosopher Adam Smith obrved that
as people imagine themlves in another's situation, they display “motor mimicry.” Later, Theodor Lipps suggested that conscious empathy is due to the unlearned “motor mimicry” of another person's
expressions of affect. Today, however, developmental theorists make clear distinctions between the process in which we are interested--primitive empathy or emotional contagion--and the more cognitive, sophisticated, and “socially beneficial” process of empathy and sympathy.3
POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF EMOTIONAL CONTAGION Theoretically, emotions can be caught in veral ways. Early investigators propod that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for the phenomenon. For example, Adam Smith obrved:
Though our brother is upon the rack . . . by the imagination we
place ourlves in his situation, we conceive ourlves enduring all
the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become
in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some
idea of his nsations, and even feel something which, though
weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them (1759/1966, p. 9). However, some forms of primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and ubiquitious a process than previous theorist
s have suppod.4 Evidence is beginning to accrue, for instance, in support of the following propositions.
Mimicry
Proposition 1: In conversation, people automatically and continuously mimic and synchronize their movements with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and instrumental behaviors of others.
Scientists and writers have long obrved that people tend to mimic the emotional expressions of others. As Adam Smith obrved: “When we e a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back on our leg or our own arm” (1759/1966, p. 4). Smith felt that such imitation was “almost a reflex.” Since the l700s, rearchers have collected considerable evidence that people do tend to imitate others' emotional expressions. Social psychophysiologists, for example, have found that facial mimicry is at times almost instantaneous; people em to be able to track the most subtle of moment-to-moment changes. Such investigations have found that peoples' emotional experiences and facial expressions (as measured by electromyographic (EMG) procedures), tend to reflect at least rudimentary features of the change
s in emotional expression of tho they obrve. This motor mimicry is often so subtle that it produces no obrvable changes in facial expression.5 For example, Ulf Dimberg (1982) studied college students at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He measured subjects' facial EMG activity as they looked at people displaying happy and angry facial expressions. He found that happy and angry faces evoked very different EMG respon patterns. Specifically, when subjects obrved happy facial expressions, they showed incread muscular activity over the zygomaticus major (cheek) muscle region. When they obrved angry facial expressions, they showed incread muscular activity over the corrugator supercilii (brow) muscle region. Rearch has also shown that subjects sometimes overtly mirror others' facial expressions. Infants begin to mimic facial expressions of emotion shortly after birth and continue to do so throughout their lifetimes. Adults engage in the same sort of mimicry.4 People also mimic and synchronize vocal utterances. Different people prefer different interaction tempos. When partners interact, if things are to go well, their speech cycles must become mutually entrained. There is a good deal
