Hatfield, Kognitywistyka
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//-->2Emotional Contagion and EmpathyElaine Hatfield, Richard L. Rapson, and Yen-Chi L. LeWhoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if yougaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.—NietzscheToday there are many definitions of empathy. Most clinical and counseling psychologists,however, agree that true empathy requires three distinct skills: the ability to share the otherperson’s feelings, the cognitive ability to intuit what another person is feeling, and a“socially beneficial” intention to respond compassionately to that person’s distress (Decety& Jackson, 2004). This chapter focuses on the second of these processes: the ability of peopleto “feel themselves into” another’s emotions via the process of emotional contagion. Wereview what is known about this pervasive phenomenon, discuss three mechanisms thatmay account for it, and propose questions for further research.Scholars from a variety of disciplines—neuroscience, biology, social psychology, sociology,and life-span psychology—have proposed thatprimitive emotional contagionis of criticalimportance in understanding human cognition, emotion, and behavior. Primitive emo-tional contagion is a basic building block of human interaction, assisting in “mind reading”and allowing people to understand and to share the feelings of others.Emotional contagion is best conceptualized as a multiply determined family of social,psychophysiological, and behavioral phenomena. Theorists disagree as to what constitutesan emotion family. Most, however, would agree that emotional “packages” comprise manycomponents—including conscious awareness; facial, vocal, and postural expression; neuro-physiological and autonomic nervous system activity; and instrumental behaviors. Differentportions of the brain may process the various aspects of emotion. However, because thebrain integrates the emotional information it receives, each of the emotional componentsacts on and is acted upon by the others (see Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994, for adiscussion of this point).Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1994) define primitiveemotional contagionas “the ten-dency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures,and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally”(p. 5).20E. Hatfield, R. L. Rapson, and Y-C. L. LeThe Emotional Contagion Scale was designed to assess people’s susceptibility to “catch-ing” joy and happiness, love, fear and anxiety, anger, and sadness and depression, aswell as emotions in general (see Doherty, 1997; Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). TheEmotional Contagion Scale has been translated into a variety of languages, includingFinnish, German, Greek, Indian (Hindi), Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish. (For informa-tion on the reliability and validity of this scale, see Doherty, 1997).Possible Mechanisms of Emotional ContagionTheoretically, emotions can be caught in several ways. Early investigators proposed thatconscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for the phenomenon. For example,the economic philosopher Adam Smith (1759/1966) observed:Though our brother is upon the rack . . . by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, weconceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become insome measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feelsomething which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. (p. 9)However, primitive emotional contagion appears to be a far more subtle, automatic, andubiquitous process than theorists such as Smith supposed. There is considerable evidence,for instance, in support of the following propositions:Proposition 1: MimicryIn conversation, people automatically and continuously mimic and synchronize their move-ments with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and instrumental behaviorsof others.Scientists and writers have long observed that people tend to mimic the emotional expres-sions of others. As early as 1759, Adam Smith (1759/1966) acknowledged that as peopleimagine themselves in another’s situation, they display motor mimicry: “When we see astroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturallyshrink and draw back on our leg or our own arm” (p. 4).Smith felt that such imitation was “almost a reflex.” Later, Theodor Lipps (1903) suggestedthat conscious empathy is attributable to the instinctive motor mimicry of another person’sexpressions of affect. Since the 1700s, researchers have collected considerable evidence thatpeople do tend to imitate others’ emotional expressions.Facial MimicryThe fact that people’s faces often mirror the facial expressions of thosearound them is well documented (Dimberg, 1982; Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980). Neuroscientistsand social-psychophysiologists, for example, have found that people’s cognitive responses(as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] techniques) and facialEmotional Contagion and Empathy21expressions (as measured by electromyography [EMG]) tend to reflect the most subtle ofmoment-to-moment changes in the emotional expressions of those they observe (Wildet al., 2003). This motor mimicry is often so swift and so subtle that it produces noobservable change in facial expression (Lundqvist, 1995).Lars-Olov Lundqvist (1995) recorded Swedish college students’ facial EMG activity as theystudied photographs of target persons who displayed happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised,and disgusted facial expressions. He found that the various target faces evoked very differentEMG response patterns. When participants observed happy facial expressions, they showedincreased muscular activity over thezygomaticus major(cheek) muscle region. When theyobserved angry facial expressions, they displayed increased muscular activity over thecorrugator supercilii(brow) muscle region.A great deal of research has documented the fact that infants (Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002),young children, adolescents, and adults automatically mimic other people’s facial expres-sions of emotion (see Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994; Hurley & Chater, 2005b, fora review of this research). For a review of the factors that shape the likelihood thatpeople will or will not mimic others’ emotional expressions, see Hess & Blair, 2001; Hess &Bourgeois, 2006).Vocal MimicryPeople have also been shown to mimic and synchronize vocal utterances.Different people prefer different interaction tempos. When partners interact, if things areto go well, their speech cycles must become mutually entrained. There is a good deal ofevidence from research using controlled interview settings that supports interspeakerinfluence in speech rates, utterance durations, and latencies of response (see Cappella &Planalp, 1981; Chapple, 1982).Postural MimicryIndividuals have also been found to mimic and synchronize theirpostures and movements (Bernieri, et al., 1991; see Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994, fora summary of this research).We are probably not ableconsciouslyto mimic others very effectively; the process is simplytoo complex and too fast. For example, it took even the lightning-fast Muhammad Ali aminimum of 190 milliseconds to detect a signal light and 40 milliseconds more to throwa punch in response. Yet, William Condon and W. D. Ogston (1966) found that collegestudents could synchronize their movements within 21 milliseconds (the time of one pictureframe). Mark Davis (1985) argues that microsynchrony is mediated by brain structures atmultiple levels of the neuraxis and is either “something you’ve got or something you don’t”;there is no way that one can deliberately ‘do’ it” (p. 69). Those who try consciously to mirrorothers, he speculates, are doomed to look “phony.”In sum, there is considerable evidence that people are capable of automatically mimick-ing and synchronizing their faces, vocal productions, postures, and movements withthose around them. They do this with startling rapidity, automatically mimicking and22E. Hatfield, R. L. Rapson, and Y-C. L. Lesynchronizing a surprising number of emotional characteristics in a single instant(Condon, 1982).Proposition 2: FeedbackProposition 2: People’s emotional experience is affected, moment to moment, by theactivation of and/or feedback from facial, vocal, postural, and movement mimicry.Theoretically, participants’ emotional experience could be influenced by (1) the centralnervous system commands that direct such mimicry/synchrony in the first place; (2) theafferent feedback from such facial, verbal, or postural mimicry/synchrony; or (3) consciousself-perception processes, wherein individuals make inferences about their own emotionalstates on the basis of their own expressive behavior. Given the functional redundancy thatexists across levels of the neuraxis, all three processes may operate to insure that emotionalexperience is shaped by facial, vocal, and postural mimicry/synchrony and expression.Recent reviews of the literature tend to agree that emotions are tempered to some extentby facial, vocal, and postural feedback.Facial FeedbackDarwin (1872/2005) argued that emotional experience should beprofoundly affected by feedback from the facial muscles:The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression,as far as is possible of all outward signs, softens our emotions. He who gives way to violent gestureswill increase rage; he who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree;and he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticityof mind. (p. 365)Researchers have tested the facial feedback hypothesis, using a variety of strategies to induceparticipants to adopt emotional facial expressions. Sometimes experimenters simply askparticipants to exaggerate or to try to hide any emotional reactions they might have. Second,they sometimes try to “trick” participants into adopting various facial expressions. Third,they sometimes arrange things so that participants will unconsciously mimic the emotionalfacial expressions of others. In all three types of experiments, people’s emotional experiencestend to be affected by the facial expressions they adopt (Adelmann & Zajonc, 1989; Matsu-moto, 1987.)In a classic experiment, James Laird and Charles Bresler (1992) told participants that theywere interested in studying the action of facial muscles. Their experimental room containedapparatus designed to convince anyone that complicated multichannel recordings wereabout to be made of facial muscle activity. Silver cup electrodes were attached to the par-ticipants’ faces between their eyebrows, at the corners of their mouths, and at the cornersof their jaws. The electrodes were connected via an impressive tangle of strings and wiresto electronic apparatus (which in fact served no function at all.) The experimenter thenEmotional Contagion and Empathy23proceeded surreptitiously to arrange the faces of the participants into emotional expressions.The authors found that emotional attributionswereshaped, in part, by changes in the facialmusculature. Participants in the “frown” condition reported being less happy (and moreangry) than those in the “smile” condition. The participants’ comments give us some ideaof how this process worked. One man said with a kind of puzzlement:When my jaw was clenched and my brows down, I tried not to be angry but it just fit the position.I’m not in any angry mood but I found my thoughts wandering to things that made me angry, whichis sort of silly I guess. I knew I was in an experiment and knew I had no reason to feel that way, but Ijust lost control. (p. 480)Paul Ekman and his colleagues have argued that both emotional experienceandautonomicnervous system (ANS) activity are affected by facial feedback (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen,1983). They asked people to produce six emotions: surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, andhappiness. They were to do this either by reliving times when they had experienced suchemotions or by arranging their facial muscles in appropriate poses. The authors found thatthe act of reliving emotional experiences or flexing facial muscles into characteristic emo-tional expressions produced effects on the ANS that would normally accompany such emo-tions. Thus, facial expressions seemed to be capable of generating appropriate ANS arousal.Vocal FeedbackAn array of evidence supports the contention that subjective emotionalexperience is affected, moment to moment, by the activation of and/or feedback from vocalmimicry (Duclos et al., 1989; Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994; Hatfield et al., 1995;Zajonc, Murphy, & Inglehart, 1989).Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues (1995) conducted a series of experiments designed totest the vocal feedback hypothesis. Participants were men and women of African, Chinese,European, Filipino, Hawaiian, Hispanic, Japanese, Korean, Pacific Island, or mixed ancestry.The authors made every effort to hide the fact that they were interested in the participants’emotions. (They claimed that Bell Telephone was testing the ability of various kinds oftelephone systems to reproduce the human voice faithfully.) Participants were then led toprivate rooms, where the experimenter gave them a cassette tape containing one of sixsound patterns, one a neutral control and the others corresponding to joy, love/tenderness,sadness, fear, and anger.Communication researchers have documented that the basic emotions are linked withspecific patterns of intonation, vocal quality, rhythm, and pausing. When people are happy,for example, they produce sounds with small amplitude variation, large pitch variation, fasttempo, a sharp sound envelope, and few harmonics. In the study by Hatfield and her col-leagues, the first five tapes were therefore designed to exhibit the sound patterns appropriateto their respective emotions. Specifically, the joyous sounds had some of the qualities ofmerry laughter; the sad sounds possessed the qualities of crying; the companionate lovetape consisted of a series of soft “ooohs” and “aaahs”; the angry tape comprised a series
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