Bi-directional emotional contagion: An analysis of chinese parents’ social media data

Abstract

Analysis of social media during the COVID-19 quarantine period in Mainland China provides access to a large amount of user-generated content for sentiment analysis during this unexpected and stressful time period. This study focuses on emotions that were communicated in the context of interactions between parents and young children to explore their emotional attitudes and emotional contagion. Results suggest that positive emotional attitudes were more prevalent in parent-child interactions, which contrasts with previous research. In comparison to their children, parents expressed more negative moods. Nonetheless, Chinese preschoolers and their parents influenced each other's emotions with bi-directional effects, providing evidence of emotional contagion. Parents’ emotional transmission sometimes resulted in passive suppression by the young children. Emotions were manifested more through physical or behavioral interactions as opposed to verbal statements of feelings, especially during parent to child transmissions. The transmission of emotions from children to parents consisted mainly of two types: children's emotional catharsis and children's active emotional agency. The discussion explores explanations for the observed emotional contagion of positive emotions between parents and children, considers the role of power and agency during emotional contagion, and discusses the effects of Chinese socio-cultural factors on the sentiment analysis.