A senior executive, Elizabeth, enters the trading floor radiating intense, negative emotion, quickly taking up residence in a centralized workstation and refusing to make eye contact with anyone. She occasionally sighs loudly and slams papers down. Based on the theory of emotional contagion, which employee is most likely to catch Elizabeth's negative emotion, leading to a drop in their own mood?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: A senior executive, Elizabeth, enters the trading floor with intense negative emotion, occupies a centralized workstation, avoids eye contact, sighs loudly, and slams papers. Based on emotional contagion theory, which employee is most likely to catch Elizabeth's negative emotion, leading to a drop in their own mood?

Option A: David, the team manager, who has the highest power and status on the trading floor. While power and status can influence social dynamics, emotional contagion is more strongly tied to cues such as proximity, emotional expression, and shared attention. Simply having high status does not guarantee greater susceptibility to catching emotions, especially if David actively regulates his own emotions or remains distant from Elizabeth’s negative cues.

Option B: Ben, who scored high on self-monitoring and adapts his behavior to control how he expresses emotions. High self-monitoring tends to help individuals regulate outward expressions and align them with social norms. This makes Ben less likely to absorb Elizabeth’s negative mood and more likely to mask or compartmentalize his own emotional response, reducing contagion risk.

Option C: Amelia, who is known for her low empathy and tendency to ignore nonverbal cues. Low empathy and ignoring nonverbal signals would likely reduce her sensitivity to Elizabeth’s emotional state, making Amelia less susceptible to emotional contagion compared with others who pick up nonverbal emotional cues.

Option D: Connor, who is usually highly stressed due to juggling a large workload and personal obligations. This description suggests Connor is already primed with elevated stress and may be more physiologically and attentively attuned to negative emotional cues in others. Such heightened sensitivity, combined with his own stress load, makes him more susceptible to absorbing Elizabeth’s negative emotion and experiencing a mood drop as a result.

Summary of reasoning across options: Emotional contagion typically operates through exposure to others’ emotional expressions, shared focal attention, and emotional resonance. Proximity to Elizabeth and the salience of her emotional cues increase contagion likelihood. Individuals who regulate emotions (Ben) or ignore cues (Amelia) are less susceptible. Those with high status (David) are not inherently more contagious unless they are also exposed and emotionally responsive. Connor’s combination of close exposure, ongoing stress, and potential emotional resonance with Elizabeth’s state creates a higher probability of mood transfer to him.

类似问题

Studies show that college students who have depressed roommates tend to become

When we mimic, feel or catch the emotions or feelings of someone else, we are experiencing:

Sally saw how happy her friend, Paula, was in a travel photo. Paula wrote alongside the photo ‘I am so happy that I finally get to travel!’. According to the Emotional Contagion theory, Sally will likely use negative emotional words in her next Facebook status update.

Kramer et al.’s (2014) study on Facebook users found that non-verbal cues are necessary for emotional contagion.

Bill is in a bad mood. When he gets to work, he sits down at his desk in a huff. He doesn’t say hello to his colleagues and when one of them asks him a question, Bill snaps. Everyone is in a bad mood as a result of Bill’s bad mood. What phenomenon does this capture?

Which of the following is an example of emotional contagion?

Which of the following represents the extent to which an emotional display by one person influences the emotional state of a bystander?

更多留学生实用工具

智能学习助手

风格化写作助手

论文查重助手

文献引用助手

课堂转译助手

课堂笔记助手

Quiz搜索助手

学校历年真题

智能刷题助手

智能匹配练习

希望你的学习变得更简单