The DOI matches its Crossref record; 142 of the 142 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The many faces of emotional contagion: An affective process theory of affective linkage
Abstract
Emotional contagion—emotions being linked across people—has captured psychologists’ attention yet little is known about its mechanisms. Early influential treatments focused on primitive mimicry. Later accounts emphasized (a) social comparison, whereby people compare their feelings with compatriots’, (b) emotional interpretation, where others’ expressive displays serve as information, and (c) empathy, or imagining another person’s feelings. This paper introduces affective process theory (APT), which unifies these mechanisms and identifies others. Using a rule-governed theoretical process, APT reveals 10 distinct mechanisms that connect people’s affective states, which fall into three types. Convergent linkage occurs when individuals share the same vantage point and interpretations of emotionally evocative stimuli. Divergent linkage occurs with a shared vantage point but different interpretations. Complementary linkage occurs when the other person is itself the stimulus. APT integrates past findings on moderating factors such as social closeness and cooperation. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063 · Cited by 32,433
A theory of social comparison processes
Festinger, L. (1954) · Human Relations · doi:10.1177/001872675400700202 · Cited by 20,926
Research in Organizational Behavior.
Grimes, A. J., Cummings, L. L., & Staw, B. M. (1986) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2392975 · Cited by 10,899
Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach.
Davis, M. H. (1983) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113 · Cited by 10,272
Pierce, W. D., & Bandura, A. (1977) · Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie · doi:10.2307/3340496 · Cited by 9,650
An argument for basic emotions
Ekman, P. (1992) · Cognition and Emotion · doi:10.1080/02699939208411068 · Cited by 9,646
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
Tropman, J. E., & Hochschild, A. R. (1984) · Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · doi:10.2307/3324333 · Cited by 8,746
Organizing and the process of sensemaking
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.1050.0133 · Cited by 6,943
Journal of social behavior and personality
(1986) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/0191-8869(86)90025-5 · Cited by 6,706
Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state.
Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/h0046234 · Cited by 6,223
Cited by
Vuori, T. O., & Huy, Q. N. (2016) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.1177/0001839215606951 · Cited by 508
The Social Effects of Emotions
van Kleef, G. A., & Côté, S. (2022) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-010855 · Cited by 534
An Affect-Based Model of Recipients’ Responses to Organizational Change Events
Oreg, S., Bartunek, J. M., Lee, G., & Do, B. (2018) · Academy of Management Review · doi:10.5465/amr.2014.0335 · Cited by 357
Emotional contagion in organizational life
Barsade, S. G., Coutifaris, C. G. V., & Pillemer, J. (2018) · Research in Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.riob.2018.11.005 · Cited by 264
Cheshin, A., Amit, A., & van Kleef, G. A. (2018) · Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2017.10.002 · Cited by 183
Metadata
- Authors
- Elfenbein, H. A.
- Venue
- Organizational Psychology Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-08-08
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 326-362
- ISSN
- 2041-3866 (ISSN-L)
- 2041-3874
- OpenAlex
- W3122320253
- Cited by
- 265
- References
- 142
- FWCI
- 19.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The many faces of emotional contagion: An affective process theory of affective linkage. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/2041386614542889
- The paper
- Elfenbein, H. A. (2014). The many faces of emotional contagion: An affective process theory of affective linkage. Organizational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041386614542889
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.