Question

What does emotional contagion mean? Describe the experiment in which psychologists explored counter-contagion. Have you experienced emotional contagion in your life?

Also, what is the empathy–altruism hypothesis?

Answer 1

• Emotional contagion is the phenomenon that individuals tend to express and feel emotions that are similar to those of others. When someone tells you with a big smile that she passed an important test, you smile as well.
• When my friend told me his father passed away I felt depressed, not so much because of the recollection of my friend’s father, whom I didnt know, but mainly because my friend was so sad talking about it.
• In other words, you do not only observe your friend’s emotions, but they also affect your own emotional expressions and emotional state. Thus, emotional contagion is a form of social influence.
• The most important function of emotional contagion is that it smoothens social interactions and facilitates mutual involvement and emotional closeness, because it helps to synchronize and coordinate the interaction.
• Communication is simply better when you have the feeling that another person understands your feelings and feels with you rather than when the other person is completely unaware of your emotions.
• The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that feelings of empathy for another person produce an altruistic motivation to increase that person’s welfare. In the empathy-altruism hypothesis, the term empathy refers to feelings of compassion, sympathy, tenderness, and the like. Altruism refers to a motivational state in which the goal is to increase another person’s welfare as an end in itself.
• The empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that those feeling high levels of empathy for a person in need will be more likely to help than will those feeling less empathy. This prediction is well supported by research. However, a number of egoistic alternative explanations have been proposed to explain these findings.
• For example, those feeling high levels of empathy may feel more distress and, consequently, may be more likely to help because they are egoistically motivated to reduce their own distress.
• Another possibility is that those feeling high levels of empathy are more likely to help because they are more egoistically motivated to avoid feeling bad about themselves or looking bad in the eyes of others should they fail to help.
• Similarly, those feeling high levels of empathy may be more likely to help because they are more egoistically motivated to feel good about themselves or to look good in the eyes of others should they help.
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