This introduction to the special issue on leadership and emotions provides an overview of the topic and articles included in this issue. We discuss the motivation behind this collection of theoretical and empirical articles, how they contribute to the goals of the issue and where we see this domain of leadership research heading in the future. One goal of this issue was to expand the focus of research beyond moods and generalized affect to discrete emotions and mechanisms through which emotions exert influence such as emotional contagion, empathy, and emotional authenticity. Relative to positive and negative affectivity, discrete emotions, mediators, and moderators of leader emotions have been studied far less. A second goal was to highlight the importance and role of emotion regulation strategies, mechanisms, and effects in the dynamic exchanges between leaders and followers. Finally, we wanted to increase the representation of multi-level perspectives and studies with regard to leadership and emotions. The compiled studies achieve these goals drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., Emotions as Social Information (EASI), Affective Events, Transformational leadership) as well as range of methods (qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods) and settings (lab and field). Taken together, the findings from this special issue illuminate some interesting relationships and we hope will inform future research on leadership and emotions in a significant way.

Little is known about the spread of emotions beyond dyads. Yet, it is of importance for explaining the emergence of crowd behaviors. Here, we experimentally addressed whether emotional homogeneity within a crowd might result from a cascade of local emotional transmissions where the perception of another’s emotional expression produces, in the observer's face and body, sufficient information to allow for the transmission of the emotion to a third party. We reproduced a minimal element of a crowd situation and recorded the facial electromyographic activity and the skin conductance response of an individual C observing the face of an individual B watching an individual A displaying either joy or fear full body expressions. Critically, individual B did not know that she was being watched. We show that emotions of joy and fear displayed by A were spontaneously transmitted to C through B, even when the emotional information available in B’s faces could not be explicitly recognized. These findings demonstrate that one is tuned to react to others’ emotional signals and to unintentionally produce subtle but sufficient emotional cues to induce emotional states in others. This phenomenon could be the mark of a spontaneous cooperative behavior whose function is to communicate survival-value information to conspecifics.

Abstract The aim was to explore whether emotional empathy is related to the capacity to react with rapid facial reactions to facial expressions of emotion, and if emotional empathy is related to the ability to experience a similar emotion as expressed by another person. People high or low in emotional empathy were exposed to pictures of happy and angry faces while their facial electromyography from the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscle regions was detected. High empathy participants rapidly reacted with larger zygomatic muscle activity to happy as compared with angry faces as early as after 500 s after stimulus onset, and with larger corrugator muscle activity to angry than to happy faces after 500 s. Accordingly, this group also reacted with a corresponding experience of emotion. The low empathy participants, in contrast, did not differentiate between the happy and angry stimuli with either facial muscles or in their self experience of emotion. The findings are related to the facial feedback hypothesis and the results are interpreted as support for the hypothesis that rapid and automatically evoked facial mimicry may be one important mechanism for emotional and empathic contagion to occur.

This study investigates whether people high in emotional empathy are more facially reactive than are people low in emotional empathy when exposed to pictures of angry and happy facial expressions. Facial electromyographic activity was measured from the corrugator and the zygomatic muscle regions. In accordance with the predictions, the high empathic group reacted with larger corrugator activity to angry as compared to happy faces and with larger zygomatic activity to happy faces. However, the low empathic group did not differentiate between the angry and happy stimuli at all. The high empathic group, as compared to the low empathic group, also rated the angry faces as expressing more anger and the happy faces as being happier. It is concluded that high empathic people are particularly sensitive in reacting with facial reactions to facial expressions and that this ability is accompanied by a higher level of empathic accuracy.

In a modified replication of Strack, Martin, and Stepper's demonstration of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis (1988), we investigated the effect of attention to emotion on the facial feedback process in a non-western cultural setting. Participants, recruited from two universities in Ghana, West Africa, gave self-reports of their perceived levels of attention to emotion, and then completed cartoon-rating tasks while randomly assigned to smiling, frowning, or neutral conditions. While participants with low Attention to Emotion scores displayed the usual facial feedback effect (rating cartoons as funnier when in the smiling compared to the frowning condition), the effect was not present in individuals with high Attention to Emotion. The findings indicate that (1) the facial feedback process can occur in contexts beyond those in which the phenomenon has previously been studied, and (2) aspects of emotion regulation, such as Attention to Emotion can interfere with the facial feedback process.

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Abstract Emotion recognition is one of the great challenges in human-human and human-computer interaction. Accurate emotion recognition would allow computers to recognize human emotions and therefore react accordingly. In this paper, an approach for emotion recognition based on physiological signals is proposed. Six basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, disgust, neutrality and amusement are analysed using physiological signals. These emotions are induced through the presentation of International Affecting Picture System (IAPS) pictures to the subjects. The physiological signals of interest in this analysis are: electromyogram signal (EMG), respiratory volume (RV), skin temperature (SKT), skin conductance (SKC), blood volume pulse (BVP) and heart rate (HR). These are selected to extract characteristic parameters, which will be used for classifying the emotions. The SVM (support vector machine) technique is used for classifying these parameters. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology provides in general a recognition rate of 85% for different emotional states.

In this study, we examined the role of mood-congruency and retention interval on the false recognition of emotion laden items using the Deese/Roediger cDermott (DRM) paradigm. Previous research has shown a mood-congruent false memory enhancement during immediate recognition tasks. The present study examined the persistence of this effect following a one-week delay. Participants were placed in a negative or neutral mood, presented with negative-emotion and neutral-emotion DRM word lists, and administered with both immediate and delayed recognition tests. Results showed that a negative mood state increased remember judgments for negative-emotion critical lures, in comparison to neutral-emotion critical lures, on both immediate and delayed testing. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of spreading activation and emotion-enhanced memory, with consideration of the applied forensic implications of such findings.

Extraversion is a personality frequently discussed as one of the strongest and most consistent factors that relates to individual subjective wellbeing. The goal of this study was to better understand how people with varying degrees of extraversion psychologically and physiologically respond differently to unpleasant circumstances. Emotional responses (e.g., levels of intensity, valence, and arousal) were assessed in determining the sensitivity level to negative stimuli that were specifically designed to provoke physical pain and sadness emotion. Physiological changes (e.g., heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)) were also measured during pain and sadness to observe sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. Our results showed that the degree of extraversion was associated with less unpleasant responses to sadness, less HR responses to both pain and sadness, and greater RSA responses to sadness. The findings suggest that the lower HR reactivity to painful and sad situations and greater RSA reactivity to sad situations in extraversion could be possibly due to increased parasympathetic activity. Additionally, enhanced parasympathetic activity to negative situations may explain an important mechanism underlying the positive connection between extraversion and subjective wellbeing.

Abstract The hypothesis that cognitive reappraisal will have different effects on emotion as a function of regulatory goal and the timing with which reappraisals are enacted within an emotion episode was tested. Forty-one participants reappraised situations depicted in unpleasant pictures by imagining those situations getting worse (increase), staying the same (maintain), or getting better (decrease). Reappraisal instructions were delivered 2 s before (anticipatory) or 4 s after (online) picture onset. Measures of rated unpleasantness, expressive behavior (corrugator muscle activity), heart rate (HR), and electrodermal activity (EDA) were collected. Increase reappraisals produced higher rated unpleasantness, corrugator muscle activity, HR, and EDA relative to maintain reappraisals. For corrugator muscle activity and EDA, the effect of increase reappraisals was only apparent when enacted online. Decrease reappraisals produced lower rated unpleasantness relative to maintain reappraisals but had no effect on expressive behavior or autonomic physiology. The effect of decrease reappraisals did not depend on when reappraisal was enacted. These data underscore the importance of regulatory goals and the impact of regulatory timing as a moderator of emotion regulatory success within an emotion episode.

After studying the literature available about emotional contagion, we found that there existed two different perspectives in the concept of emotional contagion: One is primitive emotional contagion, which considers the emotional contagion as an automatic and unconscious process, and the other is conscious emotional contagion, which sees the emotional contagion as a consciousness-involved process. The reasons of the differences suggested researchers could not distinguish between types of emotional information, i.e. low-level emotional information and high-level emotional information, and between differences in emotional transference mechanism for the both. As a result, the meanings of emotional contagion expanded more and more, and could not indicate what the exact concept was. Disagreements on the concept of emotional contagion brought about a distinction between views of its mechanism. In this article we traced the origin of “contagion” in order to deduce what the emotional contagion is, and made clear what kind of emotional information could be transmitted by emotional contagion. We suggested that only low-level emotional information could be transferred by emotional contagion, and emotional contagion was an automatic, nonconscious process. At the end of the paper, the mechanism of emotional contagion was discussed on the base of above-defined concept and the literature available. The mechanism of emotional contagion: Perception→(Mimicry→Feedback (eliciting mirror neurons))→Emotion.

原始性情绪感染理论认为,情绪感染是一个"情绪觉察—无意识模仿—生理反馈—情绪体验"的过程,情绪感染是一个由生理诱发情绪的过程。早在1884年,詹姆士和兰格就提出了情绪外周学说,同样描述了从身体变化到情绪变化的关系路径,但没有描述从刺激事件到外周身体变化的发生机制。对情绪感染的发生机制的研究能揭示这一"自下而上"的情绪产生机制。研究选取有效大学生被试62名,参与下列研究:(1)在眼动实验中使用情绪图片作为感官情绪信息,以考察觉察者的情绪觉察水平。(2)在生物反馈实验中,使用仿真课堂教学视频作为感官情绪信息,以考察觉察者的无意识模仿水平和生理反馈水平。使用路径分析证实了情绪感染的路径机制,在真实情境的诱发下,这种通过生理唤醒而诱发情绪的机制是可能的。