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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
I am involved in all mankind.
–John DonneTheoretical overview
Emotional contagion is best conceptualized as a multiply determined family of social, psychophysiological, and behavioral phenomena. Theoretically, emotions can be “caught” in several ways. Let us begin by considering a few of these.
How people might catch the emotions of others
A wise man associating with the vicious becomes an idiot; a dog traveling with good men becomes a rational being.
–Arabic proverbConscious cognitive processes. Early investigators interested in how emotions were transmitted from one individual to another focused on complex cognitive processes by which people might come to know and feel what those around them felt. They proposed that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for this transmittal. For example, 18th-century economic philosopher Adam Smith (1759/1976) observed:
Though our brother is upon the rack … by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel some thing which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. (p. 9)
Such conscious reveries could spark a shared emotional response (Humphrey, 1922; Lang, 1985).
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