关键词: 情绪同步, 情绪感染, 合作, 竞争, 自我建构

Abstract: Emotional contagion serves as a facilitator in promoting social cohesion and enhancing interpersonal relationships, leading to the alignment of behaviors, attention, and emotional states among individuals. Although emotional contagion is commonly understood as an automatic process, the level of interpersonal emotional resonance is shaped by distinct social interaction cues. Previous study has mostly focused on investigating how social context influences emotional mimicry from an individual perspective. However, emotional communication among individuals goes beyond just one-way mimicking. Affective synchrony is a fundamental mechanism that plays a key role in emotional contagion. Studying synchrony helps to enhance our comprehension of the processes and mechanisms involved in emotional contagion within social contexts. Recently, social neuroscience researchers have started studying interpersonal synchrony using hyperscanning techniques to explore affective synchrony in social emotional interactions. Facial expressions synchronize to convey emotions and serve as a crucial physiological signal for individuals to exchange and interpret emotional information. Facial expression synchrony is an embodied form of the affective synchrony, as opposed to physiological and neural synchrony, which are invisible. In this study, we employed Electromyography (EMG) hyperscanning technology and employed a dyadic interaction paradigm to simulate social interaction scenarios, investigating the influence of cooperation and competition social contexts, which are two prevalent forms of human interpersonal interaction, on emotional synchrony and its underlying mechanisms. The aim of studies 1 and 2 was to investigate the impacts of interpsersonal contexts primed by cooperative and competitive social interactions on emotional contagion, respectively. We meaured dyads’ facial expression synchrony, congruence of subjective emotional experience, and observer’s self-perception of emotional contagion in face-to-face emotional communication. Furthermore, to elucidate the underlying mechanism of interpersonal interaction contexts influencing the emotional communication, this study assessed participants’ self-construal orientation in both cooperative and competitive conditions. Subsequently, regression analyses were performed to uncover the relationship between self-construal and emotional synchronization. This findings reveal cooperative/competitive situations can promote/weaken interpersonal emotional contagion to some extent; Specifically, compared to non-interactive contexts, both cooperative and competitive interpersonal interactions are more likely to elicit emotional synchrony. When dyads engaging in emotional communication, observers in the cooperative condition reported higher emotional feelings than those in the non-cooperative condition. Furthermore, the cooperative group demonstrated greater emotional experience consistency and facial expression synchrony under conditions of happiness. Conversely, observers in the competitive condition reported lower emotional feelings, and the competitive group exhibited reduced facial expression synchrony under conditions of both happiness and sadness compared to the non-competitive group. Finally, the interdependence self-construals activated in cooperative context positively predictive facial expression sychrony and independence self-construals activated in competitive context negatively predictive facial expression synchrony. These results enhance our understanding of social-emotional interactions in ecological contexts and underscore the significance of employing hyperscanning technology to investigate affective synchrony in interpersonal communication from a dyads perspective.

Key words: Emotional Contagion, Emotional Synchronization, Cooperation, Competition, Self-Construal