Abstract: Emotions are organized, meaningful, generally adaptive systems functioning as a whole that include expressive and instrumental behaviour, patterned physiological processes, cognitions and subjective feelings. People can know other feeling by capturing their emotional expression, which is named by emotional contagion. The current mechanisms of emotional contagion researchers proposed include the mimicry-feedback, associative learning, language mediated association, direct induction, and cognitive mechnaism, in which mimicry-feedback has been accepted by most researchers. In the interactive process of emotional contagion, individual differences, gender, and cultural difference are the most important moderating variables, affecting individual emotional change. In recent years, many researchers begin to concern the intra-personal emotional change in a group, instead of inter-personal emotional change in the traditional studies. Meanwhile, the cycling mechanism is taken as the most important theory to explain the emotional interaction among group members. In the future research, the following topics should be considered, including: the influence of individual difference in the emotional contagion, the mechanisms of group emotional contagion, and the implication of emotional contagion in the service management.

Key words: Emotional contagion, Mimicry, Feedback, Group affect