Self-esteem, gender, and emotional contagion: What predicts people’s proneness to “catch” the feelings of others?

There is a scarcity of experimental studies on individual differences in susceptibility to emotional contagion (i.e., the transfer of emotions between people). Drawing on the sociometer theory of self-esteem, a social functional approach to emotions, and studies on the relationship between self-esteem and positive and negative emotionality, we predicted that differences in global self-esteem would play a significant role in experimentally induced emotional contagion. To address this link, we conducted two studies. Participants first completed a measure of self-esteem, following which they watched a video presenting a person displaying either happiness or sadness and rated their affective states. Study 1 (N = 207) demonstrated that low self-esteem fostered happiness contagion but only in women. Study 2 (N = 42) found that this relationship was completely mediated by the fear of rejection. Our results support the notion that emotional contagion is a complex social phenomenon that depends on the interplay between the receiver’s self-esteem and gender and the social meaning of the emotion displayed by the sender.