Top 10 Psych2go’s Facts

9. One study looked to see if gender effected the susceptibility a person was to being “infected” by the emotions of another.  The premise of this research came from the previous research of Hatfield et al. who hypothesized that people automatically and almost subconsciously repeat and experience the emotions we see on people we are interacting with. In other words, if you are interacting with someone who is happy, you are likely to also become happy and respond back to them with happiness. In order to find out which gender had the stronger reaction, researchers presented participants with photos from the “Pictures of facial affect” and asked them to rate the strength in which they themselves experienced the emotion that they just saw. Now, while the results pertaining to the difference between genders did not show any significant difference in level of “infection”, both genders experience significant amounts of similar responses when confronted with another person and their emotions. Specifically stronger emotions were gaged as having stronger reactions. These emotions included happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear and pleasure (Kaplan 2008).

References

Kaplan, Karen. “Happiness Is Contagious, Research Finds.” L.A. Times (n.d.): n. pag.

Http://www.fresnocohousing.com/pdfs/happiness-research-lat.pdf. 2008. Web. 2014.