Abstract
Can viewing others experiencing stress create a “contagious” physiological stress response in the observer? To investigate second-hand stress, we first created a stimulus set of videos, which featured participants speaking under either minimal stress, high stress, or while recovering from stress. We then recruited a second set of participants to watch these videos. All participants (speakers and observers) were monitored via electrocardiogram. Cardiac activity of the observers while watching the videos was then analyzed and compared to that of the speakers. Furthermore, we assessed dispositional levels of empathy in observers to determine how empathy might be related to the degree of stress contagion. Results revealed that depending on the video being viewed, observers experienced differential changes in cardiac activity that were based on the speaker’s stress level. Additionally, this is the first demonstration that individuals high in dispositional empathy experience these physiological changes more quickly.
Highlights
The ability to share emotional information with one another is an essential part of the human experience; one that adds to the richness of life, but is crucial for the coordination of social interactions
The results of this study revealed that observing others experiencing or recovering from stress leads to distinct patterns of cardiac activity in the observer
Past research has shown how being exposed to stressed others can lead to feelings of stress in oneself[17], and the current study suggests that the autonomic nervous system (ANS) may play a role in how stress responses are transferred
Summary
The ability to share emotional information with one another is an essential part of the human experience; one that adds to the richness of life, but is crucial for the coordination of social interactions. To successfully navigate the social environment, one must be adept at rapidly reading these emotional cues, and know how and when to appropriately react to them While this is generally accomplished with little effort, developing a mechanistic understanding of how emotional cues are processed in the receiver is no simple task as it involves the deciphering of dynamically changing facial expressions, postures, gestures, vocal tones and language, in near real time and in the context in which they occur[4]. The current study included many different target speakers, which allowed us to better determine whether these effects were person specific or generalizable across individuals, as previous work has only examined stress contagion from one speaker to one observer
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