Emotional reactions to a political leader's expressive displays.

Abstract

Forty college students viewed videotaped excerpts of happiness/reassurance, anger/ threat, and fear/evasion expressive displays by President Reagan. Within each display condition one excerpt was presented in image-only and one in sound-plus-image format. Emotional reactions were assessed by facial electromyography (EMG) from the brow and cheek regions and by skin resistance and heart rate. Following each excerpt, subjects also reported verbally the intensity of eight emotions. Self-reported emotions were influenced strongly by both the expressive displays and prior attitude toward Reagan as well as by media condition. Facial EMG indicated smiling during happiness/reassurance displays and frowning during anger/threat and fear/evasion displays, especially during image-only presentations. Display effects were also found for skin resistance responses when the media conditions were combined and for heart rate changes in the sound-plus-image condition. In contrast to the self-report measures, expressive and autonomic differences did not reveal an interaction between prior attitude and display condition. These results indicate that expressive displays had a direct emotional impact on viewers and that prior attitudes influenced retrospective self-reports of emotion but did not affect autonomic or facial muscle responses during stimulus exposure.

The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and its Influence on Group Behavior

“…Thus, while emotional contagion of moods can occur without conscious processing (Hatfield, Caccioppo, and Rapson, 1992), when stronger emotions are on display, the social appropriateness of those emotions may then become more important. Also, as discussed at the beginning of this paper, while contagion can certainly be a subconscious process (McHugo et al, 1985), it need not be, and it can be influenced by both internal and external cues (e.g., Laird & Bresler, 1990). Lanzetta and Englis (1989) found that if subjects were led to believe they were having a cooperative interaction with a person, then convergent contagion occurred, that is, smiles led to smiles and autonomic relaxation, and grimaces led to grimaces and autonomic activation.…”

"Mood contagion": The automatic transfer of mood between persons.

“…Individuals are more likely to adopt the view of persons they like than of those they dislike. For example, the emotions reported after watching a speech by then President Reagan determined whether viewers of a speech shared his emotions (McHugo et al, 1985). More specifically, the feelings of participants with a positive attitude toward Reagan were more congruent to his emotional display than were the feelings of participants with a negative attitude toward him.…”

“…To further scrutinize whether such an automatic form of perspective taking mediated the vicarious response, we thus decided to vary a second determinant of perspective taking. In addition to other factors, the attitude toward the target person is a well-known determinant of perspective taking (Batson, 1995;McHugo, Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, & Englis, 1985;Zillmann & Cantor, 1977). Individuals are more likely to adopt the view of persons they like than of those they dislike.…”

Teaching to Suppress Polglish Processes

“…Imitation has an important role in human acquisition and processing of speech. Imitative tendencies are observed in many cognitive domains of human behaviour, such as reproducing actions and intentions of others (Hauser, 1996;Honorof et al, 2011;McHugo et al, 1985;Nagell et al, 1993). Such convergence may be evoked in imitation of single words (Goldinger, 1997(Goldinger, , 1998Goldinger & Azuma, 2004;Namy et al, 2002) as well in conversational interactions (Pardo, 2006;Pardo et al, 2010Pardo et al, , 2012).…”