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Emotion regulation contagion drives reduction in negative intergroup emotions
Michael Pinus1,2,3, Yajun Cao1,2, Eran Halperin3
1Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA.
Nature Communications
|February 5, 2025
Summary
Targeting a portion of individuals in a group with emotion regulation, specifically cognitive reappraisal, can effectively reduce negative emotions in the entire group. Treating over 40% reliably changes collective emotional states.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Cognitive Psychology
- Behavioral Science
Background:
- Group emotions can lead to undesirable collective behaviors.
- Individual emotion regulation is challenging to scale within groups.
- Treating a fraction of a group may allow interventions to spread.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of partial emotion regulation interventions on group emotional states.
- To determine the minimum proportion of individuals needing treatment for collective emotional change.
- To validate the spread of emotion regulation strategies within groups.
Main Methods:
- An experiment was conducted with 2659 Israeli participants in groups of six.
- Participants were exposed to negative emotion-inducing political stimuli.
- Different proportions of each group received cognitive reappraisal training before interaction.
Main Results:
- Increasing the proportion of treated individuals reduced emotions in non-treated members.
- Treating over 40% of participants reliably altered group emotional states.
- Semantic projection analysis confirmed the contagion of reappraisal language.
Conclusions:
- Partial application of cognitive reappraisal can lead to collective emotion regulation.
- A threshold of approximately 40% treated individuals is effective for group change.
- Emotion regulation strategies can spread through social contagion within groups.
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