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

Abstract

The current studies aimed to find out whether a nonintentional form of mood contagion exists and which mechanisms can account for it. In these experiments participants who expected to be tested for text comprehension listened to an affectively neutral speech that was spoken in a slightly sad or happy voice. The authors found that (a) the emotional expression induced a congruent mood state in the listeners, (b) inferential accounts to emotional sharing were not easily reconciled with the findings, (c) different affective experiences emerged from intentional and nonintentional forms of emotional sharing, and (d) findings suggest that a perception-behavior link (T. L. Chartrand & J. A. Bargh, 1999) can account for these findings, because participants who were required to repeat the philosophical speech spontaneously imitated the target person's vocal expression of emotion.

Why is conversation so easy?

“…For example, when observing another person experiencing a painful injury and wincing, observers imitate the wince in their own expression [39]. Similarly, participants will mimic postures such as foot shaking and nose rubbing carried out by a person with whom they are conversing [40], and when they repeat another's speech they adopt the other's tone of voice as well [41]. Finally, it has recently been demonstrated that conversational partners dynamically align their posture [42].…”

Toward an Understanding of the Determinants of Anger.

“…There is now increasing evidence that one individual's emotion-related bodily movements can at times trigger that emotion in other persons (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999;and Neumann & Strack, 2000, for a summary of relevant research). The intriguing experiments reported by Neumann and Strack (2000) demonstrated, for example, that a spoken statement whose content was affectively neutral but that was expressed in either a slightly happy or slightly sad tone of voice evoked a congruent affective state in the listeners. Moreover, this contagion occurred even though the listeners had not consciously wanted to share the speaker's emotion, had not devoted much of their cognitive resources to what was said so that they had not fully understood the content, and were unaware that their mood had been affected by the statement's emotional tone.…”

Social Comparison as the Thief of Joy: Emotional Consequences of Viewing Strangers’ Instagram Posts

“…Initially, scholars believed that emotional contagion is caused by interaction partners automatically mimicking each other's facial expressions (Hatfield et al, 1993). However, more recent evidence suggests that facial mimicking is not a necessary condition for emotional contagion to occur (Hess & Blairy, 2001;Neumann & Strack, 2000). Instead, the mere detection of an emotion in another person seems to be sufficient to transfer this emotion to the person who detected the emotion (Neumann & Strack, 2000).…”