Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2000, Vol. 79, No. 2, 211-223 0022-3514/00/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.79.2.211 "Mood Contagion": The Automatic Transfer of Mood Between Persons Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack Universit~it Wiirzburg The current studies aimed to find out whether a nonintentional form of mood contagion exists and which mechanisms can account for it. In these experiments participants who expected to be tested for text comprehension listened to an affectively neutral speech that was spoken in a slightly sad or happy voice. The authors found that (a) the emotional expression induced a congruent mood state in the listeners, (b) inferential accounts to emotional sharing were not easily reconciled with the findings, (c) different affective experiences emerged from intentional and nonintentional forms of emotional sharing, and (d) findings suggest that a perception-behavior link (T. L. Chartrand & J. A. Bargh, 1999) can account for these findings, because participants who were required to repeat the philosophical speech spontaneously imitated the target person's vocal expression of emotion. Feelings usually arise from different forms of cognitive process- ing (for an overview, see Clore, Schwarz & Conway, 1994). From that perspective, feelings are either a by-product (Koriat, 1994) or an end product of cognitive processing (e.g., Lazarus, 1991; Rose- man, 1984). However, cognitive processes are not the only source of feelings. Feelings can also be elicited by patterns of facial, postural, and behavioral expressions. William James (1890) pro- posed that bodily expressions might temporally precede and cans- ally determine feelings. By now there is considerable support for the assumption that facial and postural expressions can exert an influence on subjective feelings (for a review, see Adelman & Zajonc, 1989). Various mechanisms have been proposed: a self- perception view (Laird, 1974), physiological processes (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983), and learning processes (Buck, 1988). Several studies have shown that motor action exerts an influence even though the emotional expression is not recognized (Stepper & Strack, 1993; Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). Because self- perception presupposes that the emotional expression is recog- nized, it is unlikely that this mechanism usually mediates the influence of motor actions on feelings. From a social psychological perspective, it might be interesting to determine whether feedback processes can also be spontane- ously activated if one merely observes another person' s emotional expression. Recently, Hatfleld, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1992) speculated that people "catch" someone else's feeling by uninten- tionally mimicking her or his emotional expression. Given that individuals unintentionally imitate the emotional expressions of Roland Neumann and Fritz Snack, Department of Psychology, Univer- sita't Wtirzburg, Wiarzburg, Germany. This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft. We thank Wolfgang Danneil, Uta Deppe, Christian Harneit, Monika Hintzen, Thomas Mussweiler, Marcus Neumann, Sonja Offer- manns, Anna Sequeira, and Lioba Werth, who served as experimenters. Special thanks go to Jens FiSrster, Martin Schilcher, Beate Seibt, Sabine Stepper, and Bob Wyer, who gave valuable suggestions to earlier versions of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Roland Neumann, Institut ffir Psychologic der Universit~t Wtirzburg, Lehrstuhl ftir Psychologic II, RSntgenring 11, 97070 Wtirzburg, Germany. 211 interactants, it is conceivable that this imitation results in a con- gruent mood state in the observer by a feedback mechanism. Because individuals are not aware that they are influenced by the emotional expressions of other people, we postulate that "mood states" are induced in the observers and that it is therefore appro- priate to talk about mood contagion. This view is based on the insight that emotions presuppose that a person knows the origin of her or his feelings, whereas moods do not depend on such knowl- edge (Ortony & Clore, 1989). Thus, although some authors have assumed that contagion results in emotions on the side of the observer (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1992), we suggest that an automatic mechanism induces a mood state. In sum, mood conta- gion can be conceived of as a two-stage mechanism that hinges on the unintentional imitation of another person's emotional behavior, which in turn activates a congruent mood state in the observer. The unintentional imitation of emotional expressions of inter- actants, recently referred to as "motor mimicry" (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Bavelas, Black, Lemery, & Mullet, 1987), represents the first step of the contagion mechanism. This tendency might be due to a more general mechanism, by which any image or thought of a movement can elicit or facilitate the actual behavior in the observer. According to the principle of ideomotor action formu- lated by Lotze (1852) and James (1890), it is sufficient to think of or merely observe a behavior to elicit it. In line with these assump- tions, Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) found that students primed with the stereotype of elderly individuals being slow un- intentionally adopted the walking speed of elderly people. In a similar vein, smiles and mannerisms are capable of automatically eliciting the same behavior in an observer, although she or he is unfamiliar with the target person (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Bargh et al. (1996) suggested that these findings can be taken as evidence that action is closely linked to perception (for further evidence, see Dijksterhnis & van Knippenberg, 1998). Other re- search has shown that the facilitation of motor responses is not restricted to imitative behavior (Prinz, 1990). Rather, motor re- sponses were facilitated whenever the movement of a stimulus resembled movement of the required response. Therefore, cogni- tive researchers have speculated that the reason why the interface between sensory input and generation of movements seems to be so seamless is that a common coding exists for both (Prinz, 1990).