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The ripple effect: emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Sigal G. Barsade

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The second step of this primitive contagion process comes from the afferent feedback people receive from mimicking others' nonverbal behaviors and expressions--an automatic process. As myriad facial, postural, and vocal feedback studies have shown, once people engage in the mimicking behavior, they then experience the emotion itself (e.g., Duclos et al., 1989) through the physiological feedback from their muscular, visceral, and glandular responses (see Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1994, for a review; Adelman and Zajonc, 1989; Laird and Bresler, 1992). One can ultimately become aware of feeling this emotion, but the initial processes that lead to it are subconscious and automatic (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1994).

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There is some evidence that there is a second, more cognitively effortful set of processes through which emotional contagion can occur. There are social comparison processes in which, after determining the amount of attention to be paid, people compare their moods with those of others in their environment and then respond according to what seems appropriate for the situation (e.g., Schachter, 1959; Adelman and Zajonc, 1989; Sullins, 1991). In this case, the recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. Empathy, a multifaceted construct (Davis, 1983), has an emotional contagion component--defined as people either seeing or anticipating another person's emotional display and then experiencing it with them--as an explicit component (Stiff et al., 1988). But the cognitive process of perspective taking, which involves putting oneself in the other person's position, is generally posited to come first, with emotional contagion following.

Regardless of the mechanism employed, it is clear that there is strong evidence from dyads to expect emotional contagion to occur in groups and that two factors in the type of emotion emitted will influence the degree of emotional contagion: emotional valence and emotional energy. Given the power of prior laboratory results, as well as the initial evidence in the field studies examining the convergence of mood in groups, it is reasonable to expect these same processes to operate in groups. Thus, as a starting point, I propose the following general hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: There will be contagion of mood among group members.

Emotional valence. Unpleasant emotions should lead to greater emotional contagion than pleasant emotions. Both psychological and organizational research has shown that people respond differentially to positive and negative stimuli, and negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events (see Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson, 1997; Rozin and Royzman, 2001, for a review). People also tend to pay more attention to and place more weight on negative information, as shown in impression formation studies (Kanouse and Hanson, 1972) in which subjects perceived negative words or personal attributes as more negative than they perceived equally matched positive words as being positive (e.g., Hamilton and Zanna, 1972; Crandall, 1975). Negative emotions have also been found to be the default value in cases of nonexplained arousal (Marshall and Zimbardo, 1979; Maslach, 1979). When people try to determine their affective state through social comparisons, cues about negative rather than positive emotions have been found to be more relevant to them.

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The ripple effect: emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Sigal G. Barsade

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