Matching your face or appraising the situation: Two paths to emotional contagion

Abstract

Emotions are believed to converge both through emotional mimicry and social appraisal. The present study compared contagion of anger and happiness. In Experiment 1, participants viewed dynamic angry and happy faces, with facial electromyography recorded from the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii as emotional mimicry. Self-reported emotional experiences were analyzed as emotional contagion. Experiment 2 manipulated social appraisal as the gaze of expression toward the target. The results showed that there was emotional contagion for angry and happy expressions both in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Experiment 1 indicated an overt mimicry pattern for happy faces, but not for angry faces. Experiment 2 found an influence of social appraisal on angry contagion but not on happy diffusion. The two experiments suggest that the underlying processes of emotional mimicry and social appraisal are differentially relevant for different emotional contagion, with happiness processing following a mimicry-based path to emotional contagion, and anger processing requiring social appraisal.