Negative Emotional Contagion Research Articles

Chinese young adults' perception of fertility: Emotional contagion in fertility policy discussions on Sina Weibo

We investigated the reactions and preferences of the Chinese populace, particularly young adults, toward China's three-child policy, a recent strategy aimed at addressing the nation's aging population that allows couples to have up to three children. By monitoring Sina Weibo discussions related to fertility policies, we gauged public sentiment and potential emotional contagion. We collected 711 main posts and 26,515 responses and used the sentiment analysis method to identify the emotional tendencies of each post, thus determining if emotional contagion occurred. Results showed there were 631 posts with negative emotional contagion effects and 554 posts with positive emotional contagion effects. Further textual analysis indicated that the Chinese public maintains a pessimistic outlook on the three-child policy and expresses concern about the detrimental impact of social circumstances and the difficulties women encounter concerning fertility.

Susceptibility to positive versus negative emotional contagion: First evidence on their distinction using a balanced self-report measure.

Susceptibility to emotional contagion is defined as the disposition of how susceptible someone is to catch others' emotions and it has long been studied in research on mental health, well-being, and social interaction. Given that existing self-report measures of susceptibility to emotional contagion have focused almost exclusively on negative emotions, we developed a self-report measure to assess the susceptibility to emotional contagion of both positive and negative emotions (2 scales). In two studies, we examined their factor structure, validity, and reliability using exploratory factor analysis (Study 1, N = 257), confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2, N = 247) and correlations. Our results confirmed the two-factor structure and demonstrated good internal consistencies. Regarding external validity, our scales showed diverging correlational patterns: While susceptibility to negative emotional contagion was linked to mental health problems and negative emotions, susceptibility to positive emotional contagion was linked to interpersonal functioning and prosocial tendencies. In conclusion, our scales appear to be internally/externally valid and a promising tool for future research.

Emotion contagion and physiological synchrony: The more intimate relationships, the more contagion of positive emotions

The study aimed to explore how interpersonal closeness (friends vs. strangers) and emotion type (positive vs. negative) influenced emotion contagion and physiological synchrony between interacting partners. Twenty-eight friend dyads (n = 56) and 29 stranger dyads (n = 58) participated in an emotion contagion laboratory task. In each dyad, one participant, the ‘sender’, was randomly asked to watch a film clip (neutral, positive, or negative), while their partner, the ‘observer’ passively observed the sender's facial expressions. Participants’ electrocardiograms (ECG) and facial electromyography (EMG) signals were recorded using the BIOPAC system. Results revealed that observing the sender's facial expressions led to the observer's spontaneous mimicry and emotional contagion, accompanied by enhanced physiological synchrony between interacting partners. In the positive emotion condition, the observers reported more positive emotions and displayed stronger zygomaticus major activity in friend dyads than in stranger dyads. Greater physiological synchrony (heart rate and heart rate variability) between interacting partners was also observed in friend dyads than in stranger dyads in the positive emotion condition. These results indicate that positive emotion contagion is more likely to occur between close partners than negative emotion contagion.

A Multilevel Study of Change-Oriented Leadership and Commitment: The Moderating Effect of Group Emotional Contagion.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of change-oriented leadership on employee change commitment, and the underlying cross-level mediating and moderating effects. Multilevel analysis of data from 583 respondents in 55 major manufacturing firms in China from 2021, reveals that change-oriented leadership explains the significant variance in change commitment. Based on Emotions as Social Information Theory and Social Exchange Theory, this study investigates the relationship between change-oriented leadership and change commitment fully mediated by emotion regulation. This study also confirms that positive group emotional contagion has moderating effects on the relationship between change-oriented leadership and emotion regulation. In addition, negative group emotional contagion has moderating effects on the relationship between emotion regulation and change commitment. Furthermore, the moderated mediation of negative group emotional contagion is identified. This study makes a unique contribution through its multilevel approach to examining the relationship between leadership, emotion, and commitment during organizational change.

Differences in emotional contagion, interpersonal relationships and social rewards in males and females: examining the links with primary and secondary psychopathic traits

AbstractIndividuals with psychopathic traits display low empathy and as a result they have difficulties maintaining meaningful relationships. Emotional contagion, the ability to automatically mimic others’ emotional states (facial expressions, movements), is a precursor of empathy that contributes to relationship quality and is impaired in individuals with psychopathic traits. The current study examines sex differences in primary and secondary psychopathic traits in a sample of 389 participants (Mage = 33.61; 241 females) and the association of these personality traits with romantic and peer relationships, susceptibility to negative (sadness, fear, anger) and positive (happiness, love) emotional contagion and social motivation factors. Hierarchical multiple regressions run separately in male and female participants, revealed different factors contribute to the maintenance of primary and secondary psychopathic traits. Findings infer different difficulties in social functioning (forming and maintaining relationships), regulating emotions, empathizing via emotional contagion, and motivating factors to engage socially, relate to primary and secondary traits, as well as differences in men and women. This research reflects the importance of investigating psychopathic traits heterogeneously in males and females, to better inform prevention efforts focused on hindering the development and maintenance of these personality traits.

Negative emotional contagion on advanced pharmacy practice experiences: Establishing resistance.

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Sentiment mutation and negative emotion contagion dynamics in social media: A case study on the Chinese Sina Microblog

Negative emotional contagion along with sentiment mutation through information propagation on social media is critical for mitigating disinformation and directing public opinion for compliance with key public interventions, such as vaccine uptake during a pandemic. Here, we develop a dynamic multiple negative emotional susceptible-forwarding-immune (MNE-SFI) model to examine how negative emotion spreads on social media and how sentiment mutation impacts by fitting the model to real multiple temporal information in messages with sentiments obtained from the Chinese Sina microblog. Emotional choices, meaning that individuals attempting to spread information are not only influenced by the objective emotions embedded in the influential information spread by influencers but also by subjective emotional tendencies, is an essential human behavior for information propagation. Hence, we seek to link the negative emotional contagion in the network at the macroscopic level to the emotional choices of individuals, and model parameters are used at the microcosmic level to measure the “copying” and “mutation” probabilities of negative sentiments in an event. Our results illustrate the emotional choices of users play essential roles in methods for mitigating harmful emotion spread and promoting meaningful emotion diffusion.

Do Informational and Emotional Elements Differ between Online Psychological and Physiological Disease Communities in China? A Comparative Study of Depression and Diabetes.

Disease-specific online health communities provide a convenient and common platform for patients to share experiences, change information, provide and receive social support. This study aimed to compare differences between online psychological and physiological disease communities in topics, sentiment, participation, and emotional contagion patterns using multiple methods as well as to discuss how to satisfy the users’ different informational and emotional needs. We chose the online depression and diabetes communities on the Baidu Tieba platform as the data source. Topic modeling and theme coding were employed to analyze discussion preferences for various topic categories. Sentiment analysis was used to identify the sentiment polarity of each post and comment. The social network was used to represent the users’ interaction and emotional flows to discover the differences in participation and emotional contagion patterns between psychological and physiological disease communities. The results revealed that people affected by depression focused more on their symptoms and social relationships, while people affected by diabetes were more likely to discuss treatment and self-management behavior. In the depression community, there were obvious interveners spreading positive emotions and more core users in the negative emotional contagion network. In the diabetes community, emotional contagion was less prevalent and core users in positive and negative emotional contagion networks were basically the same. The study reveals insights into the differences between online psychological and physiological disease communities, providing a greater understanding of the users’ informational and emotional needs expressed online. These results are helpful for society to provide actual medical assistance and deploy health interventions based on disease types.

Emotional Contagion in the Online Depression Community.

Negative emotions are prevalent in the online depression community (ODC), which potentially puts members at risk, according to the theory of emotional contagion. However, emotional contagion in the ODC has not been confirmed. The generalized estimating equation (GEE) was used to verify the extent of emotional contagion using data from 1548 sample users in China’s popular ODC. During interaction, the emotional themes were analyzed according to language use. The diurnal patterns of the interaction behaviors were also analyzed. We identified the susceptible groups and analyzed their characteristics. The results confirmed the occurrence of emotional contagion in ODC, that is, the extent to which the user’s emotion was affected by the received emotion. Our study also found that when positive emotional contagion occurred, the replies contained more hopefulness, and when negative emotional contagion occurred, the replies contained more hopelessness and fear. Second, positive emotions were easier to spread, and people with higher activity in ODC were more susceptible. In addition, nighttime was an active period for user interaction. The results can help community managers and support groups take measures to promote the spread of positive emotions and reduce the spread of negative emotions.

China Public Psychology Analysis About COVID-19 Under Considering Sina Weibo Data.

COVID-19 not only poses a huge threat to public health, but also affects people’s mental health. Take scientific and effective psychological crisis intervention to prevent large-scale negative emotional contagion is an important task for epidemic prevention and control. This paper established a sentiment classification model to make sentiment annotation (positive and negative) about the 105,536 epidemic comments in 86 days on the official Weibo of People’s Daily, the test results showed that the accuracy of the model reached 88%, and the AUC value was greater than 0.9. Based on the marked data set, we explored the potential law between the changes in Internet public opinion and epidemic situation in China. First of all, we found that most of the Weibo users showed positive emotions, and the negative emotions were mainly caused by the fear and concern about the epidemic itself and the doubts about the work of the government. Secondly, there is a strong correlation between the changes of epidemic situation and people’s emotion. Also, we divided the epidemic into three period. The proportion of people’s negative emotions showed a similar trend with the number of newly confirmed cases in the growth and decay period, and the extinction period. In addition, we also found that women have more positive emotional performance than men, and the high-impact groups is also more positive than the low-impact groups. We hope that these conclusions can help China and other countries experiencing severe epidemics to guide publics respond.

Intervention optimization for crowd emotional contagion

When emergencies occur, negative emotional contagion produced in crowds makes people irrational, resulting in stampedes and crushes. The intervention of crowd emotional contagion is an efficient method for avoiding serious accidents and ensuring the safety of people’s lives and properties. However, it is a challenging problem to provide an optimized intervention scheme for crowd emotional contagion because the appropriate intervention intensity is hard to achieve, e.g., too little intervention cannot restrain the outbreak of emotion, while excessive intervention will lead to the waste of manpower and material resources. Moreover, stochastic evolutionary characteristics of emotional contagion have further aggravated this problem since it is difficult to describe the stochastic changes in emotional contagion accurately. To solve this problem, we propose an intervention optimization scheme for crowd emotional contagion to maximize the number of uninfected individuals while minimizing the intervention cost. First, we construct a stochastic event-based emotional contagion (SEEC) model to capture the stochastic evolution characteristics of emotional contagion. Based on SEEC, we then propose a Hawkes process-based intervention (HPI) model to quantify the intervention intensity. Next, we formulate the intervention optimization as a problem of maximizing the ratio of the expected number of individuals being intervened to the cost of manual intervention. Finally, we propose an intervention optimization-artificial bee colony (IO-ABC) algorithm to heuristically solve the optimization problem. The experimental results show that our method can effectively intervene in emotional contagion.

Negative online reviews, brand equity and emotional contagion

PurposeDespite the growing consensus that consumers extensively use online reviews and that negative reviews can significantly damage brand equity, it remains uncertain whether negative online reviews that focus on different aspects of a service have a similar or differential effect on brand equity. This study aims to fill this gap and explores the mediating role of emotional contagion and what kind of response helps better deter their negative effect.Design/methodology/approachThis research is conducted through a one-panel study and three experimental studies. SAS enterprise miner is used for text mining analysis and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Process macro models are used to analyze the experimental data.FindingsNegative reviews related to the tangibility, responsiveness and empathy dimensions have a more detrimental effect on brand equity than negative reviews related to the assurance and reliability dimensions. The results also provide evidence that emotional contagion is more prevalent when consumers read reviews that are specific to the empathy and responsiveness dimensions. Finally, accommodative responses from the service provider are more effective in deterring the effect of a negative online review on brand equity.Research limitations/implicationsThe generalizability of this study is limited to the restaurant and hotel industry.Practical implicationsThe findings will also help the brand manager in understanding the comparative effect of service quality-specific negative reviews on brand equity and also the type of responses that brand managers should give to negative reviews.Originality/valueDespite online reviews receiving increased attention in academic research, Service quality (SERVQUAL) dimension-specific reviews have not been studied until now. This study contributes to the service quality-related literature by providing evidence that not all negative online reviews related to different Service quality (SERVQUAL) dimensions equally affect brand equity.

How a group service failure at a restaurant turns into an individual dissatisfaction? A scenario-based experiment

Regarding service failures restaurants are one of the most experienced one in the tourism and hospitality businesses. High level of service interaction and presence of other consumers in a groups of different size make the failures more complicate. Customers whose service expectation is not meet inform other group members through their negative emotions and may lead to a similar change in the emotions of others. Therefore, dealing with service failure requires more inclusive perspective. In this context, the main purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between service failure and dissatisfaction from group service interaction. To that end, it examines i) the effect of the negative behavioral reactions and emotional contagion on the perceived service failure and service dissatisfaction and ii) the mediator role of service failure on the effect of the negative emotional responses and emotional contagion on dissatisfaction. To collect data scenario-based experiment was applied. Data obtained through both online and face to face survey. Based on 1437 scenario based questionnaire structural equation modeling analysis was performed. Results show that the dominant factor effecting their service failure perception is the feeling of disappointment rather than anger in group failures. Emotional contagion is also effective on service failure perception. Neither negative emotions nor contagion has direct effect on dissatisfaction. Perceived service failure consisting the dimensions of service quality, has a mediating role between emotional states and feeling of satisfaction. That is, consumers’ dissatisfaction feelings occur if they support their emotional reactions with their cognitive assessments of service quality.

Source Trust and COVID-19 Information Sharing: The Mediating Roles of Emotions and Beliefs About Sharing.

Health information sharing has become especially important during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic because people need to learn about the disease and then act accordingly. This study examines the perceived trust of different COVID-19 information sources (health professionals, academic institutions, government agencies, news media, social media, family, and friends) and sharing of COVID-19 information in China. Specifically, it investigates how beliefs about sharing and emotions mediate the effects of perceived source trust on source-specific information sharing intentions. Results suggest that health professionals, academic institutions, and government agencies are trusted sources of information and that people share information from these sources because they think doing so will increase disease awareness and promote disease prevention. People may also choose to share COVID-19 information from news media, social media, and family as they cope with anxiety, anger, and fear. Taken together, a better understanding of the distinct psychological mechanisms underlying health information sharing from different sources can help contribute to more effective sharing of information about COVID-19 prevention and to manage negative emotion contagion during the pandemic.

A model of negative emotional contagion between male-female rat dyads: Effects of voluntary exercise on stress-induced behavior and BDNF-TrkB signaling

Emotional contagion refers to the sharing of emotional states between individuals and can cause depressive behaviors in healthy persons who live with depressed individuals. Negative emotional contagion has been observed in animal models, but the vast majority of studies are short-term and bear little resemblance to long-term human relationships. Thus, the first aim of this study was to establish an animal model of stress-induced negative emotional contagion that develops across time and between pairs. To accomplish this, we tested the hypothesis that sedentary male rats that cohabitate for five weeks with a stress-exposed female will exhibit a depression-like phenotype that is observable on behavioral and physiological measures. In addition, drawing from a comprehensive literature that describes the beneficial effects of prior exercise on stress-related behavior, we tested our second hypothesis that in males that were paired with a stressed female, prior voluntary exercise will diminish the impact of negative emotional contagion. We found that pair housing a healthy male with a stressed female led to emotional contagion; males gained less body weight, were anhedonic, demonstrated heightened anxiety-like behavior, had lower serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels, had decreased hippocampal BDNF-stimulated tyrosine receptor kinase B (TrkB) signaling and had increased pro-inflammatory cytokine expression in the hippocampus. For the most part, the five-week exercise window that occurred prior to pair housing had few effects in non-stress paired rats, but had partial, yet substantial protective effects in rats that were pair-housed with a stressed female. Specifically, stress-paired, exercised rats showed less depressive-like behavior, had partially preserved hippocampal BDNF-stimulated TrkB signaling, had normalized serum BDNF concentration, and had hippocampal cytokine and immediate early gene levels that were equivalent to controls. These preclinical findings introduce a new model of negative emotional contagion between dyads of male-female rats and support the view that inclusion of exercise programs would be beneficial for persons that may, in the future, be susceptible to negative emotional contagion.

Negative emotions shape the diffusion of cancer tweets: toward an integrated social network–text analytics approach

PurposeDrawing on the cognitive-functional model of emotions and emotional contagion, the authors aim to examine the role of negative emotions in the diffusion of cancer tweets.Design/methodology/approachUsing an integrated approach of social network and text analytics, the authors analyzed 142,883 cancer tweets from February to March 2018. The roles of negative emotions, emotional contagion, cancer themes and user influence on the diffusion of cancer tweets were examined.FindingsResults indicated that cancer tweets expressing negativity and anger diffused more widely, while those expressing sadness or fear were less likely to diffuse. However, contrary to the authors’ expectation, cancer tweets expressing negative emotions (i.e. negativity, anger and fear) were less likely to arouse similar emotions among retweets, thus suggesting that emotions in cancer tweets were not as contagious as they seemed. Finally, user influence was the most important factor explaining the diffusion of cancer tweets, although cancer-related themes (i.e. affective, informative and social) had marginal effects on likelihood of diffusion.Originality/valueUsing a novel integrated social network–text analytics approach, the authors found that to understand cancer tweets' diffusion, it is critical to go beyond examining the content of tweets about cancer and the influence of messengers – the virality of cancer tweets is inextricable from the negative emotions.

A system for real-time intervention in negative emotional contagion in a smart classroom deployed under edge computing service infrastructure

Literature has indicated that negative emotions may lead students to disengagement in teaching activities. Furthermore, the contagion of negative emotion is similar to infectious disease diffusion that drives more students into negative emotions. However, few methods have been brought forward to intervene in negative emotional contagion in real time, and most of them are limited to interventions of teachers, which are often not timely and even cause students to resist. Intervention in negative emotional contagion in classroom imposes several fundamental challenges on model and system design. In this paper, we address these issues from the following three aspects: (1) to design an emotional contagion model for classroom scene to locate the source of negative emotional contagion; (2) to develop deep learning-based visual emotion recognition system to recognize emotions of all students in the classroom; (3) to design and deploy the emotion recognition system as an edge computing-based service for minimizing response time to achieve multi-person emotional recognition and intervene in real time. We have applied the system to real-world classroom. Our results have shown that the system achieved two objectives: (1) reducing the number of students with negative emotions; (2) reducing response time to achieve real-time recognition and intervention. Meanwhile, this work provides a new perspective on research into emotional contagion in the classroom and smart education.

The Influence of Social Networks on Team Performance: Moderating Effect of Emotional Contagion

With the development of the Internet, the use of social networks has become more and more important in team management. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of social networks use on team performance and the moderating role of emotional contagion plays in this relationship. 80 college students from 20 innovation and entrepreneurship teams completed questionnaires on team social networks use scale and team performance scale, and then performed team tasks. Three video clips were used as emotionally induced materials. Results showed that the use of social networks can positively predict team performance, and that positive emotional contagion also has the predictive effect. Critically, emotional contagion acts as a moderator in the relationship between the use of social networks and team performance. Specifically, under the condition of positive emotional contagion, the high-level use of social networks can positively predict better team performance; under the condition of negative emotional contagion, there is no significant difference in team performance at different uses of social network service levels. These findings suggest that managers should pay more attention to the dissemination of positive emotional information in social networks to improve team performance.

China Public Psychology Analysis About COVID-19 Under Considering Sina Weibo Data

COVID-19 has become the most serious public health emergency in the world recently. It not only poses a huge threat to public health, but also affects people's mental health. Take scientific and effective psychological crisis intervention to prevent large-scale negative emotional contagion is an important task for epidemic prevention and control. However, the free and open social network platform has brought challenges to it. In combination with the natural language processing technology and Python's SnowNLP library, this paper established a sentiment classification model to make sentiment annotation (positive and negative) on the 105,536 epidemic comments in 86 days on the official Weibo of People's Daily, the test results showed that the accuracy of the model reached 88%, and the AUC value was greater than 0.9. Based on the marked data set, we explored the potential law between the changes in Internet public opinion and epidemic situation in China. First of all, we found that during the epidemic, most of the Weibo users in China showed positive emotions, and the negative emotions were mainly caused by the fear and concern about the epidemic itself and the doubts about the work of the government. Secondly, there is a strong correlation between the changes of epidemic situation and people's emotion. Also, we divided the epidemic into three period. The proportion of people’s negative emotions showed a similar trend with the number of newly confirmed cases in the growth and decay period, and during the extinction period, it shows the same trend with the number of newly imported cases. In addition, we also found that women have more positive emotional performance than men, and the high-impact groups is also more positive than the low-impact groups. We hope that these conclusions can help China and other countries experiencing severe epidemics to control online public opinion, guide publics respond to such emergencies scientifically and improve the work of the government. Funding Statement: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81672085;71871169;81372804;U1933120), the Chinese Medical Association of Clinical Medicine special funds for scientific research projects (17020400709), and the Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2019CFA062). Declaration of Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

"I Don't Feel Like the Odd One": Utilizing Content Analysis to Compare the Effects of Social Media Use on Well-Being Among Sexual Minority and Nonminority US Young Adults.

Although there is evidence of associations between social media (SM) use and mental well-being among the general population, these associations among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons are poorly understood. This study compared the influence of SM experiences on mental well-being between LGB and non-LGB persons. Online cross-sectional survey. National sample of 2408 US adults aged 18 to 30 years. We asked participants to provide examples of when SM affected their well-being separately in good and bad ways. We coded, summed, and used rate ratios (RRs) to compare responses of LGB and non-LGB individuals. Thematically similar codes were described and grouped into categories. Most responses described positive SM effects. However, of 6 codes that were significantly more frequent among LGB respondents, only social capital (RR = 1.58, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.17-2.12) described a positive effect. Five codes described negative effects of SM for LGB users: negative emotional contagion (RR = 1.28, 95% CI, 1.04-1.58), comparison with others (RR = 1.28, 95% CI, 1.01-1.62), real-life repercussions (RR = 1.86, 95% CI, 1.18-2.94), envy (RR = 2.49, 95% CI, 1.48-4.19), and need for profile management (RR = 2.32, 95% CI, 1.07-5.03). These findings suggest that, for LGB persons, gaining social capital from SM is valuable for establishing and maintaining connections. Increased negative SM experiences may pose a risk for the mental well-being of LGB individuals.