Relationship of Susceptibility to Emotional Contagion with Automatic Emotion Processing and Emotional Competences

Individuals differ in their susceptibility to emotional contagion, i.e., the automatic tendency to mirror and synchronize another person’s expressions and movements, resulting in shared emotional experiences. The objective of this research was to investigate how susceptibility to emotional contagion connects to automatic facial emotion processing and emotional competences. An affective priming task using happy, angry, neutral, and blank faces was administered to a sample of 104 women with a mean age of 24.72 years (SD = 3.63). They completed self-report measures assessing susceptibility to positive and negative emotional contagion, alexithymia, trait emotional intelligence, affectivity, and depression. Although prime valence-congruent evaluative shifts were found in our sample, there were no correlations of susceptibility to positive and negative emotional contagion with affective priming effects. Susceptibility to positive emotion contagion was negatively correlated with alexithymia and positively with emotional intelligence. However, susceptibility to positive emotion contagion predicted only emotional intelligence (but not alexithymia), when controlling for relevant affect variables. Our findings indicate that emotional contagion susceptibility could be less strongly linked to automatic emotion perception than previously suggested. Moreover, the trait-like tendency to resonate with other people’s positive emotions seems to be linked to enhanced capacities in perceiving, interpreting, and regulating emotions.