Abstract:

Past research on conscious emotional contagion has implied that emotional contagion can be regulated by subsequent perception, which can be retrieved by unconsciousness. Similarly, can emotional contagion be regulated by antecedent view or not? That is, perception exists before emotional contagion and regulates the final effect of emotional contagion. In the research, the experiment condition was classroom activities. We adopted within-subjects design. We guided students to set up two antecedent views through pre-experimental instruction: authoritative teacher and novice teacher, and then we played three kinds of videos to students, namely neutral emotional, positive emotional, and negative emotional teaching videos. The students’ physiological data were recorded by eight-channel biofeedback instrument when students watched videos. After the experiment, each student was required to finish a questionnaire, i.e., the evaluation scale of teaching’s emotional contagion in class (for students). The experimental results demonstrated that students could maintain a high level of attention and could not transfer when they were watching the authoritative teacher’s videos. As a result, students’ high level of attention improved the effect of authoritative teacher’s positive emotional contagion, i.e., munity regulation, for it was connected with the more attention that students paid to the authoritative teacher. Students’ maintained a low level of attention while watching the novice teacher’s videos, therefore, the effect of novice teacher’s positive emotional contagion was less than that of authoritative teacher’s. we name this is immunity regulation. Students’ attention was lower under exposure to the novice teacher’s negative emotion than to that of the authoritative teacher’s. Students always pay high-powered attention to the authoritative teacher no matter what emotion the authoritative teacher appeared. In other words emotional contagion was modulated by the focus of attention. The novice teacher had a stronger negative emotional (i.e., burnout) contagion than the authoritative teacher, which was due to students’ rationalization to the authoritative teacher’s negative emotion, thus immunizing the authoritative teacher’s negative emotion. Furthermore, Surveying with a questionnaire the evaluation scale of teaching’s emotional contagion in class, we gained an important result that students made more positive evaluations of the authoritative teacher than that of the novice teacher regardless of watching both teachers’ neutral, positive, or negative teaching videos. As shown in Table 9, there existed significant differences between the evaluation to the authoritative teacher and that to the novice teacher (p < 0.01). Thus, when individuals felt a certain emotion (e.g., joy), memories and judgments consistent with that emotion were stimulated. When applied to teacher-student relationship, this conclusion suggested that when a teacher expresses positive emotions, students would feel more positive (through mood contagion), and be more likely to make more positive evaluations to the teacher. It is especially true of the authoritative teacher, because students’ positive antecedent view to the authoritative teacher improved their evaluations to him. For the novice teacher, students’ negative antecedent view lowered their evaluations. These results indicated that student’s antecedent view could regulate teacher’s effect of EC. A teacher’s effect of EC was weakened when students could not reasonably explain the cause of his/her emotional expression. When students perceived the authoritative teacher's emotional display as a need for teaching, it could maintain students’ high evaluations to him/her. Therefore the authoritative teacher’s negative emotional contagion was less likely to occur. However, students would interpret the novice teacher’s negative emotional display as incompetence, thus his/her negative emotional contagion was more likely to take place. Hence, two conclusions could be drawn: (1) there are two methods of antecedent view regulating emotional contagion: concentration and rationalization. (2) there exist two results of antecedent view regulating emotional contagion: munity and immunity.

Key words: antecedent view, emotional contagion, munity regulation, immunity regulation