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ABSTRACT: Three studies (N = 1988) describe the development and validation of the Emotional Contagion (EC) Scale, a 15-item unidimensional measure of susceptibility to others' emotions resulting from afferent feedback generated by mimicry. Study 1 assesses the EC Scale's reliability (Cronbach's a = .90). Study 2 finds susceptibility (a) positively related to reactivity, emotionality, sensitivity to others, social functioning, self-esteem, and more associated with emotional than cognitive modes of empathy, (b) negatively related to alienation, self-assertiveness, and emotional stability and, (c) unrelated to masculinity and approval motivation. Study 3, an experiment, finds that EC Scale scores reliably predict biases in participants' evaluations and are correlated with a measure of responsiveness to afferent feedback and self-reports of emotional experience following exposure to emotional expressions.
It has long been noted that emotions appear to be contagious (Darwin, 1872/1965; Jung, 1968; Reik, 1948). Some theorists have attributed the phenomenon to occult processes, projection and fantasy (Deutch & Madle, 1975), and learning (Aronfreed, 1970; Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde, & Sveida,1983). Others have proposed self-perception processes wherein individuals infer their emotional state from their own emotional expressions and behaviors and from the expressions and behaviors of others (Adelman & Zajonc, 1989; Bem, 1972; Laird, 1974, 1984; Laird & Bresler, 1990).
Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1992, 1994) have argued that the process of emotional contagion is much too automatic, fast and fleeting, and too ubiquitous to be accounted for by such cognitive, associative, or self-perception processes. Hatfield and her colleagues have proposed that, as people attend to others, they continuously and nonconsciously mimic the other's fleeting emotional expressions and synchronize their facial, vocal, postural, and instrumental expressions with those to whom they are attending. The afferent feedback generated by this mimicry produces a simultaneous congruent emotional experience. Hatfield and her colleagues have termed this process "emotional contagion" and define it as "a tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person's and, consequently, to converge emotionally" (1994, p. 5). Although there is accumulating support for Hatfield and her colleagues' theory, gathered from a wide range of participants and settings (for a review see Hatfield et al., 1994), until now there has been no reliable measure of individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion (i.e.,...