Emotional contagion in dyadic online video conferences - Empirical evidence based on self-report and facial expression data [PREPRINT]

Over the last years, many aspects of people‘s lives have been moved to digitally supported environments. So far, the impact of these changes on their emotions and interpersonal processes remains largely unclear. As one essential and prevalent emotional process in social interaction, emotional contagion comprises the transmission of emotions between two or more individuals. In previous research, it has been studied in various interactive face-to-face contexts (e.g., teachers/students or psychotherapists/patients) applying different methodologies. In this study, we aimed to add to these findings by examining emotional contagion in dyadic online video conferences based on subjective self-report and automatically coded facial expression data. We applied a lab-based experimental approach involving two participants interacting with each other via synchronized computers. In a structured interaction paradigm, N = 104 participants in k = 52 dyads were prompted to talk to each other about recent personally relevant experiences that made them angry, happy, and sad (in three conditions) while being filmed by webcams. The participants’ facial expressions during the interaction were analyzed using automated facial expression analysis software, and they retrospectively reported their subjective emotional experiences after each condition. Our preregistered analyses provided evidence of emotional contagion of all three emotions during the video conferences as judged by self-report: Listeners reported to experience the speakers’ target emotions (anger, joy, sadness) significantly most strongly in the respective condition. Listeners also facially expressed significantly more joy in the Joy condition, but the frequency of facially expressed anger and sadness was generally very low, and did not differ across conditions. Further evidence for the temporal co-occurrence of facially expressed joy between the interaction partners was provided via cross-recurrence quantification analysis, as both interaction partners’ facial expressions of joy, but not of anger and sadness, co-occurred significantly above chance. Overall, we conclude that emotions can be transmitted across interaction partners during online video interactions, but the face does not seem to be the key channel for those contagion processes, particularly not for negative emotions.