Emotional Transmission in the Daily Lives of Families: A New Paradigm for Studying Family Process

Abstract

This collection of articles brings together studies that examine the transmission of emotions between family members. All studies employ repeated diary or experience-sampling data to examine daily within-person and within-family variations in emotional experience. Emotional transmission is evaluated by assessing circumstances in which events or emotions in one family member's immediate experience show a consistent, predictive relationship to subsequent emotions or behaviors in another family member. This introduction places this empirical paradigm in the context of other approaches to research, discusses research methods and statistical procedures for studying emotional transmission, and reviews the major findings obtained thus far in this body of research. We argue that this empirical paradigm provides a promising tool for understanding emotional processes within the daily ecology of family and community life.