Matching Your Face or Appraising the Situation: Two Paths to Emotional Contagion

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Affective Science
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Emotions are understood to converge through emotional mimicry and social appraisal.
• The mechanisms underlying emotional contagion for different emotions remain incompletely understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the emotional contagion of anger and happiness.
• To investigate the roles of emotional mimicry and social appraisal in the contagion of these emotions.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Recorded facial electromyography (EMG) from zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii to measure mimicry while participants viewed angry and happy faces. Self-reported emotions assessed contagion.
• Experiment 2: Manipulated social appraisal by altering the gaze direction of facial expressions toward the participant.

Main Results:

• Both anger and happiness showed emotional contagion in both experiments.
• Happiness contagion was associated with overt facial mimicry (Experiment 1), whereas anger contagion was not.
• Social appraisal influenced anger contagion but not happiness contagion (Experiment 2).

Conclusions:

• Emotional mimicry and social appraisal play differential roles in emotional contagion.
• Happiness contagion appears to be primarily driven by mimicry.
• Anger contagion necessitates social appraisal, suggesting distinct neural and cognitive pathways for different emotion types.