Research Of Gender Difference In Anger Contagion And Its Mechanism

Emotional contagion(EC) describes this phenomenon:when people has interaction with others, he/she accepts other people’s emotion statements and gains the same emotions as these people. Although there is description about emotional contagion in the hippocratic period of ancient Greece, the psychologists didn’t give it systematic studies until1990s. There is a close relationship between emotional contagion and empathy or affective priming. But they also have many differences. Until now, researchers have not come to an agreement about the gender difference in EC. Most researches used supraliminal stimulus, while there is little research using subthreshold stimulus. According to the existing literature, there are two hypothesises explaining the emotional contagion:Imitation-feedback Hypothesis and Social Compare Hypothesis. According to the Imitation-feedback Hypothesis:while we contacting with others, we tend to imitate and synchronize our actions with others automatically and constantly. As our imitation and feedback happens, our subjective emotional experience changes too. In the other words, we tend to "catch" other people’s emotion at any moment, then the emotional contagion happens. According to the Social Compare Hypothesis:when we contacting with others, we will make a integral judgment about others. If we perceive the similarity between ourselves and the others, we will make similarity-test which makes our emotion inclined to the others’ statement. That is to say, emotional contagion happens. If we perceive the difference between ourselves and the others, we will make diversity-test which makes our emotion deviated from the others’statement. Anger is one of the four basic emotions. Researches have found there were close relationships between anger and people’s depression or anxiety. The emotional contagion of anger plays an important role in group events. But there are little research about the emotional contagion of anger. Therefore, it is necessary to study the anger contagion.In order to find out the different performances of anger contagion in the conditions of supraliminal stimulus and subthreshold stimulus and try to integrate the two hypothesis, this study designs two experiences to find the fact. We used emotional contagion scale to determine subjects’emotional contagion.145students attended this study. Experiment one uses2(gender:male/female)x2(exposure time: supraliminal/subthreshold) two factors mixed design to investigate the gender difference of anger contagion in different exposure time. Experiment two uses2(gender consistency between the subject and anger expresser:consistent/inconsistent)x2(whether induce the compare of similarity:yes/no) two factors mixed design to investigate the interaction of gender consistency and similarity comparison. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) The subjects showed great emotional contagion of anger, no matter they were exposed to anger faces or anger videos.(2) The degree of anger in supraliminal condition is higher than the degree of anger in subthreshold condition.(3) The gender difference of anger contagion have different performances under different exposure time:men was more anger than women under supraliminal condition while there was no obvious difference under subthreshold condition.(4) When subjects have same gender with the anger expressers, the degree of they anger contagion is much higher than they have different gender. There is no obvious difference whether we induced the subjects’similarity comparison or not.(5) When we induced the subjects’ similarity comparison, subjects in the same gender group had more anger contagion effect than that in the different gender group. There was no obvious difference between those two groups when we didn’t induce their similarity comparison. But we can still found emotional contagion effect. When subjects had same gender with anger expressers, subjects whose similarity comparison were induced had higher emotional contagion degree than subjects whose similarity comparison were not induced. When subjects had different gender with anger expressers, subjects whose similarity comparison were induced had lower emotional contagion degree than subjects whose similarity comparison were not induced.(6) Emotional contagion is the result of both Imitation-feedback Hypothesis and Social Compare Hypothesis:Imitation-feedback Hypothesis is the basic of emotional contagion while Social Compare Hypothesis can magnify or diminish the degree of emotional contagion.