Emotional contagion
"[6] One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person.
Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation.
[clarification needed] In The Art of Loving (1956), social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.
[10] Research on emotional contagion has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including organizational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological.
[3] Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson's 1993 research into emotional contagion reported that people's conscious assessments of others' feelings were heavily influenced by what others said.
Transference of emotions has been studied in a variety of situations and settings, with social[11] and physiological[12] causes being two of the largest areas of research.
[14] The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks",[15] a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is described by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis (2018) as a "disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind.
"[16] Tony D. Sampson et al. criticize the notion that "academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the protection for human research subjects because they are working with a social media business that has 'no obligation to conform' to the principle of 'obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out'.
"[16] A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users' timelines.
Hence, the tweet "I am not happy" would be scored as positive: "Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers."
One view, proposed by Hatfield and colleagues, describes emotional contagion as a primitive, automatic, and unconscious behavior that takes place through a series of steps.
[3] Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious.
According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them.
[6] Aside from the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are also times when others' emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something.
A different kind of intentional mood contagion would be, for instance, giving the group a reward or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.
This includes the need to manage emotions so that they are consistent with organizational or occupational display rules, regardless of whether they are discrepant with internal feelings.
The group's emotional state influences factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team's performance.
Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge either when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action.
Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution.
The basal areas including the brain stem form a tight loop of biological connectedness[clarification needed], re-creating in one person the physiological state of the other.
