4.3: Emotions in Relationships

Emotional Contagion

Emotion states exist in smaller “windows'' of time; experiencing them is much less dependent on our personality. Emotion states are emotions that we experience in a specific moment of time and are generally impacted by the conversations, interactions, and individuals we are in the presence of. Emotion states come and go much more easily than moods or personality, and they can change from one moment to the next. Some emotion states we experience are connected “directly to other people, like anger, envy, jealousy, hate and shame” (The Libarynth. n.d.). For example, we may find that we feel joy and comfort in the presence of certain people in our lives, while we may feel a sense of annoyance or frustration when interacting with others. Our emotional awareness that allows us to tune in to these different sets of emotional states and understand the connection and the reasoning as to why we experience these emotional reactions in the presence of certain people. This greater understanding allows us to better manage our emotions and create facilitative or positive emotional boundaries, which we will discuss later in this chapter.

Emotions are like yawns: they are contagious. When we see someone yawn, it creates the urge to yawn ourselves—and emotions work in the same way. This “emotional yawn” is called emotional contagion. Emotional contagion occurs when we are exposed to other individuals' emotions during social interactions. Our instincts tend to impact these social interactions and create an alignment with the emotional states we are perceiving in others (Herrando & Constantinides, 2021).

Figure 4.3 Baby’s Grey Knit Hat by Minnie Zhou on Unsplash

Emotional contagion can be both a conscious and unconscious reaction. When we are in social settings with people whom we feel close to and would identify as significant individuals in our lives, we might be able to pick up and be impacted by their emotion states more quickly and without reason, as if it is an “automatic” connection we have with the person, whereas other interactions may require us to appraise, or assess the emotional state of the other person to establish our own reaction (The Libarynth. n.d.). Both reactions are part of our emotional awareness in balancing our communication to being effective and appropriate.

Emotions can be transferred from one individual to another through a wide array of communicative expressions: physical features, such as the urge to smile at someone when they smile at you; vocal expressions, as when someone starts to become tearful while they are talking, we might find ourselves holding back tears as well; posture or kinesics, when we see someone slump down into a chair we might feel their exhaustion; as well as through our nervous system, where our brain and nerve cells transmit information, we are able to not just perceive the emotions of others but literally feel them within ourselves.

Empathy versus Sympathy

Emotional contagion relates to the concepts of empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is the ability to understand your own experiences and emotional reactions to the environment around you and use that as a way to compare to other individuals who may be having similar emotional experiences. Sympathy is the projection of our emotions on other people, where we might feel bad for the person but we don’t see ourselves as agents in the emotional state. Empathy, in contrast, is sharing the emotional experiences with the other person. By showcasing emotional awareness to experience the emotional state of the other person. Empathy is directly connected to the concept of emotional contagion" in order to feel empathy, one must be able to rely on our instincts in order to align to the communicative expressions that the other person is conveying. Empathy is expressed in phrases such as “I understand how hard this is.”

Empathy is a learned skill that not everyone has or will enact the same way as others. Some individuals may not experience empathy at all, may have heightened levels of empathy, or may be at the same level as others. However we experience empathy, it does not mean we cannot communicate in an effective manner—but it may mean these aspects of emotional expression do not come as easily or in the same manner as others. For example, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized as having more difficulty enacting communication and social functioning as those who are neurotypical. Individuals who have ASD may express emotions and empathy in various ways that may look different, such as displaying an overabundance of emotional expression and empathy, or displaying very little. This impacts the amount of emotional contagion that is being experienced on the individual level.

Cultural Understanding

Another example of ways in which empathy and emotional contagion may be showcased in different behaviors is through cultural understanding. All cultures have different display rules regarding emotional expression, as we’ve learned, and that will translate to affecting others around them in various ways. Research has shown that within many cultures, negative emotional reactions and the subsequent impact of emotional contagion creates different display rules as well, therefore there are different measures of emotional contagion in order to understand these concepts within context (Kuang, et al., 2019). One example of different ways various cultures will showcase empathy include expressions of love. While some cultures showcase love outwardly through public displays of affection such as hand holding, kissing, or hugging, other cultures do not welcome these overt demonstrations of love in public ways.

Figure 4.4 Man hugging woman near trees by Gus Moretta on Unsplash