Emotional Entrainment Research Articles

How we get along depends on how you make me feel: An episodic perspective on leader–follower emotional entrainment and daily interaction quality

AbstractLeader–follower relationships are a cornerstone of leadership research. Considering recent developments that point to emotions as key determinants of dyadic relationships, we shift the focus of this literature to the episodic interplay of leader emotional expressions and follower emotional reactions for the emergence of high‐quality interactions. Specifically, we develop an emotional entrainment perspective stating that the trajectory of leader emotional expressions and corresponding follower emotional reactions over the course of a day gives rise to follower perceptions of their interaction quality with their leader. We glean additional insights by examining follower attachment styles as a moderator. Results of an experience sampling study (Nemployees = 72, Ndays = 479) demonstrate that emotional entrainment of high‐activated emotions (joy and fear) predicts end‐of‐day interaction quality contingent on followers' (avoidant and anxious) attachment styles. Future avenues for research on the emergence of high‐quality leader–follower relationships are discussed.

Interaction Rituals at Content Trade Fairs: A Microfoundation of Cultural Markets.

In this article, we show how ritualized periodic encounters of business partners help to reproduce business relations and a shared understanding of doing business based on ethnographic fieldwork at six international trade fairs in three different cultural industries. We draw on Randall Collins' theory of interaction rituals (IRs), which highlights the relevance of emotional contacts in social life. Although Collins' theory and his conceptional instruments help to shed light on a neglected aspect in the sociology of markets, our results go beyond his ethological interpretation of interactions. First, we conclude that Collins underestimates the direct impact of the uneven distribution of economic resources on IRs. Second, we observed not only emotional entrainment in IRs but also the strategic production of emotions.

Leader-Follower Emotional Entrainment and Daily Interaction Quality: The Role of Follower Attachment

Followers’ high-quality interactions with their leader are a cornerstone of leadership research. Despite a growing understanding of leader emotions as static predictors of high-quality leader-follower relationships, research has yet to pay attention to the micro-level, dynamic interplay of leader and follower emotions for the emergence of daily interaction quality. We develop an episodic emotional entrainment perspective stating that leaders’ expressions of positive (joy, calmness) and negative emotions (fear, sadness) serve as affective events influencing corresponding follower emotions. Over the course of a day, this manifests in affective entrainment patterns (i.e., the leaders’ and followers’ affective states fluctuating in a common rhythm), which in turn predict followers’ perceived interaction quality with their leaders. The strength of the entrainment process, however, is influenced by the follower’s attachment style. We conducted a daily diary study across ten workdays with four measurements each day (N=72 employees; N=497 daily responses). Results of within-day multilevel latent growth models support an emotional entrainment process such that followers’ felt emotions oscillated with the observed leader emotional expression over the course of the day. Within-day changes in followers’ felt high-activated emotions (i.e., joy, fear) predicted perceived end-of-day interaction quality, whereas changes in low-activated emotions (i.e., calmness, sadness) did not. The relationship between leaders’ expressions of joy (fear) and corresponding follower felt emotions at the end of the day via emotional entrainment was weaker (stronger) for followers with high attachment avoidance (attachment anxiety), which in turn was positively (negatively) associated with end-of-day interaction quality.

“Etiquette-Observing” Emotional Actions

Abstract The development of the Sociology of Emotions proves the potential correlation between emotion and reason. This study draws on the perspective of the Sociology of Emotions, follows the academic development of the symbolic interaction theory, and adopts the qualitative case study methodology to explore the elements and methods of emotional actions by Xiaomin, the pre-employment preschool teacher during her internship. Our analysis of data collected through observations, interviews, and artifacts finds that an emotional action involves six major elements, namely, emotional subject, emotional symbol, situational condition, emotional meaning, focus and entrainment (mutual focus and emotional entrainment) and emotional object. Based on this finding, this study distinguishes four types of emotional actions, namely, integrative emotional action, divergent emotional action, disintegrative emotional action, and convergent emotional action. Focusing on the composing elements, this study offers a new microscopic way of interpreting emotional actions different from the macroscopic approach that stresses institutional and cultural structures. It is also a useful application of the studies of emotions of the symbolic interaction theory.

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

A cartography of energy medicine: From subtle anatomy to energy physiology

The field of energy medicine (EM) is perhaps the most controversial branch of integrative medicine. Its core concept - the existence of an invisible healing energy – has not yet been validated by Western medicine, and the mechanism(s) of action of its techniques have not been fully elucidated. This paper addresses these problems by marshalling several types of evidence: basic science research into electromagnetic fields (EMF), subjective sensations experienced when receiving EM treatments, and clairvoyant perceptions of EM in action. The latter two sources of information, while not solid enough to meet current standards of scientific rigor, can nonetheless generate important new information. A hypothesis is then developed to explain these findings.First, the main components of the human subtle energy system are presented: the “subtle anatomy” of the meridians, of the energy centers and of the biofield. Several representative EM techniques are then analyzed to determine which specific components of that energy structure they impact. Next, EM's mechanisms of action are explored by describing how these altered energy dynamics can affect biologic processes. This subject is termed “energy physiology”, in parallel with conventional medicine's foundation in anatomy and physiology. Finally, potential research into energy physiology is outlined that focuses on several common but distinctive experiences which are not fully explained by the current mechanistic biomedical model. Plausible and testable energy-based explanations are proposed for phantom limb pain, emotional entrainment in groups, unusually rapid symptom response to EM, and the invisible templates that guide cell growth and differentiation.This analysis is intended to serve as a guide to future clinical and research explorations into the multidimensional nature of human beings. As Western medicine develops technologies that can generate objective empiric evidence in these subtle domains, we will be able to more fully understand the energetic components of health and illness.

Perceived Emotional Synchrony in Collective Gatherings: Validation of a Short Scale and Proposition of an Integrative Measure.

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between participation in collective gatherings and rituals and different important psychosocial variables and processes, such as social sharing of emotions, group cohesion, identity fusion, prosocial tendencies and behaviors, and well-being (e.g., Rimé, 2009; Xygalatas et al., 2013; Khan et al., 2015; Páez et al., 2015). These studies, coming from different lines of research, have proposed diverse explanatory mechanisms to explain the positive social and psychological effects of collective gatherings. In the present article, we focus on one of these mechanisms, known as collective effervescence, emotional communion, emotional entrainment, or perceived emotional synchrony (PES). First, we briefly discuss current conceptions of the emotional states and experience during collective gatherings and what they bring to the definition of PES. We close this point by proposing an integrative definition of PES. Second, structural validity of the original PES scale is examined. Third, incremental validity of PES is examined in two longitudinal studies, particularly with respect to well-being. Finally, we propose an integrative short form of the PES Scale, which measures antecedents and behavioral effects of collective effervescence.

Heated Atmosphere: Organizational Emotions and Field Structuring in Online Climate Change Debates

We use an organizational issue field to conceptualize how organizations partake in the signification of amorphous, yet intransigent issues – such as climate change. Following a network conception, field structure is captured as the linkages between organizations. Besides meaning system, and values, emotional expressions can affect the positioning of organizations within the field and, hence, how they define, debate, and address the core issue. Thus, we ask: How do framings, values, and emotion affect the structure of an organizational issue field? We answer our research question by synthesizing theories of fields, structuring, and emotion. By completing a network analysis of the online climate change debate, we find that organizations are most likely to link to other organizations expressing similar emotions – resembling organizational emotional entrainment. Expressed emotionality influences organizations’ positions in an organizational issue field even beyond cognitive framings like issue stance, values like moral worldviews, and typical in-group clusterings like organizational type or political orientation.

Rituals, Emotional Entrainment and National Identification

Abstract Although the effects of nationalized mega-events on national identification have been theorized and examined by a number of studies, little is known about the specific mechanisms that bring about changes in people’s attitudes towards their country. The authors hypothesize that during nationwide rituals, in particular sports mega-events, participants experience collective emotional entrainment in the context of national symbols and practices that in turn increases their identification with their nation. The authors present results of a naturalistic quasi-experimental study around the 2012 uefa European Football Championship with participants from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Using a multidimensional measurement of national identification, the authors show that the experience of emotional entrainment is associated with changes in symbolic, civic, and solidary facets of identification in ways specific to the different national contexts.

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

International football tournaments, emotional entrainment and the reproduction of symbolic boundaries. A case study in Germany

Understanding the social consequences of major soccer events is important for social science researchers and policy-makers alike. On the one hand, socially integrative effects are ascribed to these events. On the other hand, they are suspected of increasing the devaluation of minorities and disadvantaged groups. Sociological theories in a Durkheimian tradition suggest that the emotional entrainment that goes along with football-related rituals might play a role. We thus investigated the effects of the World Cup 2010 on the derogation of minorities and disadvantaged groups in Germany and hypothesized that the emotional entrainment is a predictor of changes in derogation. Results of our naturalistic study show significant increases in derogative attitudes after the World Cup. Contrary to our expectations, emotional entrainment is not associated with this increase. We discuss possible alternative explanations, in particular the influence of public discourse.

Speech Perceptual Periodicities Facilitate Lexical Access and Contextual Emotional Responses

Here we show that the frequency of consonant sound repetitions in different samples of language describe a continuum, with speeches of outstanding politicians lying on the upper end and writings of schizophrenic subjects on the lower end. Furthermore, we show that the perceptual periodicities of a speech of Obama facilitate lexical access and induce emotional responses analogous to music and congruent with the context. This provides indirect evidence of emotional entrainment between the speaker and his audience. Our findings also support the transformative technology of the mind theory of music (Patel, 2010). In fact, we argue that music and poetry were invented by transforming the previously acquired ability to analyze the prosodic component of language, which was advantageous in social interactions.

Emotional entrainment, national symbols, and identification: A naturalistic study around the men’s football World Cup

Some theories suggest that collective emotions, in particular emotional entrainment as the feeling of affective attunement with others during rituals, can increase the identification with a social group. Furthermore, emotional entrainment is supposed to emotionally ‘charge’ group symbols that are part of ritual practices and influence group-related attitudes and solidarity even beyond the ritual context. This article tests these assumptions in a naturalistic study around the 2010 Football World Cup, which reliably generates emotional entrainment in a ritualized, nation-focused context. Results indicate that emotional entrainment during the tournament is a predictor of changes in national identification and the perceived emotional significance of national symbols after the tournament. Moreover, emotional entrainment partially mediates the relationship between pre- and post-World Cup national identification and the perception of national symbols.

Exploring Cross-Modality Affective Reactions for Audiovisual Emotion Recognition

Psycholinguistic studies on human communication have shown that during human interaction individuals tend to adapt their behaviors mimicking the spoken style, gestures, and expressions of their conversational partners. This synchronization pattern is referred to as entrainment. This study investigates the presence of entrainment at the emotion level in cross-modality settings and its implications on multimodal emotion recognition systems. The analysis explores the relationship between acoustic features of the speaker and facial expressions of the interlocutor during dyadic interactions. The analysis shows that 72 percent of the time the speakers displayed similar emotions, indicating strong mutual influence in their expressive behaviors. We also investigate the cross-modality, cross-speaker dependence, using mutual information framework. The study reveals a strong relation between facial and acoustic features of one subject with the emotional state of the other subject. It also shows strong dependence between heterogeneous modalities across conversational partners. These findings suggest that the expressive behaviors from one dialog partner provide complementary information to recognize the emotional state of the other dialog partner. The analysis motivates classification experiments exploiting cross-modality, cross-speaker information. The study presents emotion recognition experiments using the IEMOCAP and SEMAINE databases. The results demonstrate the benefit of exploiting this emotional entrainment effect, showing statistically significant improvements.

Theodore D. Kemper, Status, Power and Ritual Interaction: A Relational Reading of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins.

Kemper, Theodore D., Status, Power and Ritual Interaction: A Relational Reading of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, 305 pp. $104.95 hardcover (978-1-4094-2736-0) The question of what influences our behaviours most, individual factors, social and structural conditions of environment, or interaction of both, is still a current sociological debate. Kemper proposes a theoretical model from a radical standpoint: our behaviours, choices, and motives are status-power relational products and self is irrelevant for sociological analyses. This book has potential to ignite passionate and constructive theoretical debates in fields of social psychology and social inequality. Kemper considers that ritual as conceptualized by Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins, is incomplete since status-power dynamics are neglected. Using an axiomatic theoretical model, he suggests that all our actions, including altruistic and compassionate ones, aim to enhance status and/or power. Our status and/or power motivated behavioural patterns are mediated through reference groups that determine our values, beliefs, and decisions. A reference group is defined as any individual or group with whom we have a real or imagined (p. 34.). By abiding to values, norms and expectations of a reference group, we aim 1) to claim, confer, or consume status and/or, 2) to acquire and manage power for others or ourselves while avoiding sanctions or negative consequences from this reference group. The reference group seeks to civilize what Kemper calls organism: locus of our drives, passions, and desires (p. 49), but this organism is not self as defined by previous social scientists. Indeed, Kemper suggests that theoretical concept of self is superfluous to understand human behaviours sociologically. Our motives, beliefs, and thoughts result from our relationships, not self. We do not mobilize in conflicts because of our ideas and we do not bind together because of our beliefs. Rather, we strive to remain loyal to reference groups to which we identify. When we behave, reference group to which we identify influences our behaviour, not self with its thoughts, beliefs, emotions, or cognitive processes. To illustrate accuracy of his model, Kemper revisits Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins' definitions of ritual to demonstrate shortcomings of their sociological theoretical appraisals and versatility of his theory. According to Kemper, Durkheim erred with assumption that collective effervescence reinforced solidarity through collective consciousness; instead he contends that participants experience collective effervescence to enhance their status-power standing. Goffman reified situations and his understanding of ritual presented everyday interactions as sacred, whereas he should have recognized that rules and rituals confirm status and/or power. Collins described conversations as synchronized interactions when in fact they are geared towards status-power claims. In addition, Kemper contends that Collins failed to recognize that emotional entrainment is a consequence of status-power struggle and confused ritual success with status-power success. Kemper proposes that ritual should be defined as: the enactment of a type of relationship and wishes to convince us that analyzing ritual through status and power dimensions is more fruitful for study of social interaction than study of a conception of self (p. 173). Kemper navigates with great ability classical and contemporary theories showcasing his vast knowledge of a wide range of sociological oeuvres. …

Entering and leaving the tunnel of violence: Micro-sociological dynamics of emotional entrainment in violent interactions

Evidence from close ethnographic observations, photos, videos, and interviews show that persons in violence-threatening situations experience the emotional state of confrontational tension/fear ( ct/f). This emotion constitutes a barrier that makes most violence abort. Given one of several interactional patterns that allow violence to proceed past this barrier, violence is largely clumsy, imprecise, and uncontrolled. Moments of violence are often experienced as perceptual distortions in the flow of time, vision, sound, and sense of self, an altered state of violent consciousness that the author refers to by the metaphor, the tunnel of violence. The latter part of the article extrapolates the theory to consider mechanisms by which this emotional tunnel is prolonged into episodes lasting longer than a few seconds. These mechanisms include: self-entrainment in one’s own bodily rhythms; reciprocal micro-coordination between attacker and victim; audience or team entrainment. Some experienced individuals learn techniques to manipulate the emotional processes of the tunnel of violence for their own advantage. Greater awareness of micro-sociological processes hold out the prospect of heading off violence in the local situation itself.

Song Structure and Phenomenology: Text and Music in 'Mr. Tambourine Man'

The song is the most fundamental format in music, ubiquitously present across cultural and epochal boundaries. To share a particular moment through the synchronized engagement in words and melody brings on a state of embodied and emotional attunement and entrainment that seems to be uniquely human. The integration of words and melody holds a remarkable power over our imagination and our feelings, and this offers a challenge to cognitive science. How can we explain the fact that a simple embodied phenomenon, like changing the way we use our voice from speaking mode to singing mode, can have such far-reaching consequences for our psyche and such strong emotional and social ramifications?In this paper I present an analytical study of the cognitive dimensions of two of the key elements involved in singing: rhythm and meter, and I shall apply this analysis to poetry and music. This leads to a discussion of the phenomenology of the embodied musical experience, where I use Bob Dylan’s song Mr. Tambourine Man as a paradigm example. The study is part of an ongoing investigation in musical embodiment.

Freud and Interaction Ritual: A Response to Manning

This is a nice review, but the editor has given me some pages to expand on a topic that Philip Manning only briefly mentions—the place of Freud in contemporary microsociology. Parsons and other sociologists used Freud chiefly as a theory of the superego, that is, to explain socialization and morality. On the other side, Dennis Wrong and others argued against the oversocialized conception by stressing the id. Some post-structuralist theorists (including many feminists) have used Freud for a theory of the self, especially gendered selves. I submit that interaction ritual (IR) chain theory covers the ground that Freud covers but does it in a more adequate fashion. We no longer need Freud’s model of superego for a theory of socialization or a theory of the self. In part, the Meadian tradition provides a mechanism of socialization—the generalized other (and its ancillary particularized others). The advantage of Freud was that he pointed to the emotional aspects of interaction, where Mead is more strictly cognitive. IR theory combines the two, showing that the generalized other emerges from microprocesses of mutual attention focus and emotional entrainment in infancy and early childhood. Moreover, the interactionist model has the advantage of showing how socialization or internalization is lifelong. Conversation experiences—whether religious, political, career, even friendship and erotic—happen whenever there is a highintensity interactual ritual. This is the kind of thing that Freud, as an early pioneer, pointed to long ago (in his model of trauma), but we now have a more generalized and flexible mechanism. Moreover, the neo-Durkheimian microtheory of rituals provides a theory of morality that is more open to historical and personal variations than Freud’s punitive superego. Another of Freud’s historical legacies was to emphasize unconscious mental processes. We have advanced on this front as well. Sociologists like Norbert Wiley and Margaret Archer have shown that we can study the inner self empirically, by studying interior dialogue. This is at least halfway to Freud’s unconscious, and it gives us some explicit criteria for describing the degree to which something is conscious: how articulate it is an interior dialogue. I have tried to show (in chapter 4 of Interaction Ritual Chains ) in reanalyzing some of Wiley’s data, and some of my REVIEW ESSAY

Promoting student engagement in science: Interaction rituals and the pursuit of a community of practice

AbstractThis study explores the relationship between interaction rituals, student engagement with science, and learning environments modeled on communities of practice based on an ethnographic study of an eighth grade urban magnet school classroom. It compares three interactional events in order to examine the classroom conditions and teacher practices that can foster successful interaction rituals (IRs), which are characterized by high levels of emotional energy, feelings of group membership, and sustained interest in the subject. Classroom conditions surrounding the emergence of successful IRs included mutual focus, familiar symbols and activity structures, the permissibility of some side‐talk, and opportunities for physical and emotional entrainment. Sustained interest in the topic beyond the duration of the IR and an increase in students' helping each other learn occurred more frequently when the mutual focus consisted of science‐related symbols, when there were low levels of risk for participants, when activities involved sufficient challenge and time, and when students were positioned as knowledgeable and competent in science. The results suggest that successful interaction rituals can foster student engagement with topics that may not have previously held interest and can contribute to students' support of peers' learning, thereby moving the classroom toward a community‐of‐practice model. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach