Emotional Contagion and Empathy

Most clinical and counseling psychologists have identified three distinct skills required in true empathy: the ability to share the other person’s feelings, the cognitive ability to intuit what another person is feeling, and a “socially beneficial” intention to respond compassionately to that person’s distress. Scholars from various disciplines, including sociology, biology, neuroscience, social psychology, and life-span psychology, argue that primitive emotional contagion—a basic building block of human interaction that allows people to understand and to share the feelings of others—can shed light on human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This chapter discusses emotional contagion and describes three stages in the process of emotional contagion: mimicry, feedback, and contagion.