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Researches On The Similarity Comparation Of The Class Centarl Persons’ Anger Contagion

Posted on:2013-11-20Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J LiFull Text:PDF
GTID:2247330371471236Subject:Development and educational psychology
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Emotional contagion is the interaction process in which one’s emotional expression (including facial expression, posture, speech, etc.) stimulates and induces others whose emotions ultimately apt to the former speaker. In the process of social contact, one can not only predict others’ emotional state by catching their verbal and nonverbal information, but automatically imitate their expressions, sounds, gestures etc to gain consistent emotions as theirs. In recent years, as the switching of researchers’focus on social function of emotion, attention has been attached to studies on emotional contagion which gradually probe into the process and mechanism of inner-group emotion contagion from the interaction among individual emotion. Especially the emotional effect of group central person to the subordinate members has been a hot topic currently. The central person in group or team is the one who possesses both higher social status and better interpersonal relations. Numerous studies have shown that the central person, whether positive or negative emotions will have an impact on group members as well as determining the emotional atmosphere and working efficiency of the team. The team led by a leader who has positive emotion present greater enthusiasm for work, thus with more efficient job performance follows. However, while a large number of studies supporting the central person in the emotional contagion effect, some studies also found that under certain conditions, the emotional experience of group members will deviate the central person’s emotion, acting the contrast effect. According to Mussweiler’s Selective Accessibility Model, in social comparison process, individual’s self-evaluation is determined by the activated similar information between individual and the standard, that is to say, similarity comparison generates assimilation, dissimilarity comparison produces the contrast effect. Therefore, the key point to understand the distinguished contagious effect of central person’s emotional expression is the activated degree of similar information between individual and comparison standard.To further test the impact of similarity comparison to the anger contagion of group central person, the classic social comparison theory is taken as basis, with reference of resent studies, the combination of questionnaires and the situational experiment, three classes in university are randomly chosen as the participants, the paper designs three experiments to systematically explore the similarity comparison of class central persons’anger contagion effect. Experiment one uses a 2 (gender of participants:male, female)* 2 (gender of the central persons:male, female) mixed experimental study to explore the effect of similarity comparison in class number of different genders on the anger contagion of the central persons. Experiment two employs a 2 (the expression degree of central person:high or low)* 2 (the attitude consistence between participants and the central person:inconsistency or consistency) mixed experiment to see the impact of the consistency of class members and the central person’s attitude on anger contagion. To further find more direct evidence of the similarity and dissimilarity comparision impact on emotional contagion, and thoroughly explore the common social information processing model, experiment 3 applies the picture priming paradigm to further examine the similarity comparision of the central person’s anger contagion effect. The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The class central persons’anger expression would generate significant contagious effect to class members.(2) After activating the subjects’gender awareness, the anger of the central person is more likely affect the same sex subjects. To put it another way, the male central person has more anger contagion to the boys, the female central person has more anger infection to girls; when the consistent gender is taken into consideration, the degree of subjects who experience the anger emotion is obviously higher than those inconsistent gender.(3) There is stronger contagious effect of lower anger central person than the higher one; no matter how strength the central person expressed angry, the consistent attitude produce higher degree of anger contagion than that of inconsistency.(4) In the priming study, apparent discrepancies are among similarity priming group, dissimilarity priming and control group. The extent of anger experience in similarity priming group is higher than different priming group. But there is no obvious difference between priming groups and the control group.Through the above three experiments, the paper has deeply and systematically probed into the similarity comparison mechanism of the central person’s anger contagion. Moreover, we analyzes the process of the similarity comparison combined with the Selective Accessibility Model. The conclusions of this study make instructive significance to the group leaders; the group incidents, and harmonious interpersonal relationships as well as education and teaching fields etc. Likewise, future research should focus on extending the research perspective of emotional contagion; more research needs to be done on group emotional contagion and it’s social psychological mechanisms, etc.
Keywords/Search Tags:central person, emotional contagion, social comparison, Selective Accessibility Model, similarity comparison
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