Emotional Contagion

Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion involving the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors from one person to another or across a larger group, occurring both consciously and unconsciously through processes such as reasoning, analysis and imagination, and documented in humans as well as other primates, dogs and chickens. The psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson defined it in 1993 as the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize one's expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person and, as a result, to converge emotionally with them; when a person unconsciously mirrors a companion's facial expression, they come to feel a reflection of that companion's emotion, so that smiling tends to make a person feel happier and frowning tends to make them feel worse. It is distinguished from empathy by the absence of individuation, the capacity to separate one's own experience from another's, and abnormally pervasive emotional contagion has been identified as a symptom of some psychiatric conditions such as borderline personality disorder.