The interplay of perceiving and regulating emotions in becoming infected with positive and negative moods

The study examined relations between individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion and two self-reported emotion-related skills (i.e., ‘perception of the emotions of others’ and ‘regulation of one’s own emotions’). Participants of two independent female samples were exposed to emotionally contagious films showing a woman displaying negative and positive affective states (sadness, cheerfulness, neutral). Participants good at emotion regulation and weak at emotion perception showed the weakest emotional contagion to the sadness film, whereas the strongest responses to the cheerfulness film were observed in weak emotion regulators who were good at emotion perception. The effect observed for subjective ratings of emotional contagion (sample 1) was replicated with cardiovascular measures of emotional arousal (sample 2). The findings indicate that some variance of susceptibility to emotional contagion can be explained by the interaction of specific emotion-related traits (i.e., emotion perception and regulation) and that a more specific approach may be better suited to explaining responses to emotion-eliciting events than composite measures of trait emotional intelligence.