Abstract
Three studies investigated the effects of two fundamental dimensions of social perception on emotional contagion (i.e., the transfer of emotions between people). Rooting our hypotheses in the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communion (Abele and Wojciszke in Adv Exp Soc Psychol 50:198–255, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800284-1.00004-7, 2014), we predicted that agency would strengthen the effects of communion on emotional contagion and emotional mimicry (a process often considered a key mechanism behind emotional contagion). To test this hypothesis, we exposed participants to happy, sad, and angry senders characterized by low vs. high communion and agency. Our results demonstrated that, as expected, the effects of the two dimensions on socially induced emotions were interactive. The strength and direction of these effects, however, were consistent with our predictions only when the senders expressed happiness. When the senders expressed sadness, we found no effects of agency or communion on participants’ emotional responses, whereas for anger a mixed pattern emerged. Overall, our results align with the notion that emotional contagion and mimicry are modulated not only by the senders’ traits but also by the social meaning of the expressed emotion.
Highlights
Drawing on the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communion (Abele & Wojciszke, 2014) as well as the recent models of emotional contagion and mimicry (Fischer & Hess, 2017; Wróbel & Imbir, 2019), we propose that emotional contagion and mimicry are jointly modulated by both social dimensions
The high-communion senders were rated as more communal (M = 5.86, SD = 0.96) than the low-communion senders (M = 1.94, SD = 0.84), F(1,61) = 394.82, p < .001, ηp2 = .87 [.80, .90] and the high-agency senders as much more agentic (M = 6.05, SD = 0.99) than the low-agency senders (M = 2.16, SD = 1.02), F(1,61) = 312.90, p < .001, ηp2 = .84 [.76, .88]
We observed a small-to-medium effect showing that participants responded with less anger to the high-communion angry senders (M = 3.17, SD = 1.49) than to the low-communion angry senders (M = 3.47, SD = 1.61), ηp2 = .05 [0, .19]. This effect, was more pronounced for the high-agency angry senders, whereas for the low-agency angry senders, the effect of communion was small to non-existent. These results show that high agency strengthened the effect of communion on participants’ self-reported anger following exposure to anger displays, but this effect was opposite to that found for self-reported happiness following exposure to happy displays
Summary
We used G*Power (Faul et al, 2007) and the results of the previous study on the effect of agency and communion on emotional contagion (Wróbel et al, 2020), to calculate the sample size.. The analysis indicated that n = 58 was required to detect an effect size of f = .20 with 95% power and alpha level of .05. We recruited 72 undergraduates (52 women) but based on predetermined exclusion criteria we excluded participants who guessed the hypotheses (n = 2) or declared that they had not watched the videos carefully (n = 8). Our final sample included 62 participants (41 women; Mage = 21.74, years, SD = 4.21). We used a 3 (senders’ emotional display: happiness, sadness, anger) × 2 (senders’ communal traits: high communion, low communion) × 2 (senders’ agentic traits: high agency, low agency) within-participants design
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