Affective contagion is the tendency to mirror the emotional behaviours and patterns of the people surrounding you, it is often a subconscious process that can be influenced by an array of different facial expressions, body movements, and/or conversations. It can occur on a small scale, such as returning a smile to someone, and can extend to much greater levels like, global mourning. Affective contagion has been specifically related to the feeling of empathy, which is known for causing shared neural activation between the observer and the one being observed, our brain activates similar neural circuits to mimic the experience. This is because the phenomenon is linked to mirror neurons, which are a type of brain cell that fire either when you yourself perform an action or when we witness someone else perform the same action. However, affective contagion is also linked to other systems of the brain such as the Limbic system, which controls the emotion, and the Autonomic Nervous system which controls bodily functions such as the heart rate and breathing.
There are many reasons as to why affective contagion occurs, it being a deep rooted evolutionary tool that humans have relied on for centuries. It is a form of communication that is able to go further than words, no matter the language, you’re able to understand the emotional context being conveyed. The ability to influence and be influenced by the people around you works as a catalyst for many important social experiences that help us grow as humans. For example, children learn through imitation, their ability to share emotion with both their peers and the adults in their life is what teaches them the necessary social skills to recognise, interpret, and respond to the emotional cues of others. As well, humans have used this contagion as a survival mechanism to quickly grasp an understanding of the situation they’re in, for example, fear spreading faster often correlates with danger getting closer. In cases like this it’s the emotional state that is contagious, causing responses like the release of adrenaline to be spread. This tool is incredibly useful in uniting groups, it allows us to regulate our emotions through syncing with others, which also makes for a closer bond within groups, built on trust and acceptance.
Research on the subject matter began in the late 19th century, with Charles Darwin actually being one of the first to publicly recognise that emotion spreads through facial expressions. In his 1872 book ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ he argued that emotional expression is not cultural, but instead is something we are born with, that is universal and is inherited. This was a rather radical statement of the time, however paved a way for a lineage of scientific research on the matter.
In the late 19th century Gustave Le Bon, a French social theorist, wrote ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’, a book about group psychology. In it he argues that when individuals join a crowd they becomes much more emotion led and much less rational. They lose their individual identity and become part of a shared psychological state, which overrides personal values and heightens emotions. This theory gave inspiration and influence to some of the most influential researchers such as Sigmund Freud, who agreed with Le Bon’s theory that individuals behave differently in crowds, but he offered a deeper explanation based on factors such as identification and having group leaders act as father figures.
Research continued around shared emotional states, however it wasn’t until the 1980s when the term ‘affective contagion’ became more standard within sociology and psychology. In 1993 Elaine Hatfield, an American social psychologist, released her book (along side John T Cacioppo and Richard Rapson) titled ‘Emotional Contagion’, providing evidence and a framework for understanding how emotions spread between people. This book popularised the term and made it much more known and widely used within neuroscience, psychology, and cultural theory. The book focuses on the behavioural mechanisms such as mimicry that are involved in the process of emotional contagion, exploring evidence from various fields, suggesting emotional mirroring is a fundamental part of human interaction
Understanding affective contagion is an important factor for this work, as I want to be able to decipher the difference between when emotional contagion is occurring and when it is another factor at hand. This will become required when writing my script as the case studies I am using are videos, and so I want to be able to portray to the listener how I have seen, through the footage, affective contagion happening via body language and facial expression. I need to be able to express it sonically for the listener to grasp the full extent to which the crowds of people are affecting each other.