The conscious or unconscious transmission of positive and negative moods and emotions within dyads, social groups, and organizations is referred to as emotional contagion, a process that may modulate a variety of social phenomena from group affiliation and cooperativeness to conflict and mob violence. In the present project, we aim to explore the extent to which in hierarchical organizations emotional contagion spreads from leader to follower more than in opposite direction and whether transformational vs transactional leadership style differentially influences the viral spreading of negative vs positive moods. We will combine an ecological procedure for inducing contagion from environment to people and across elements of (a)symmetric dyads with collection of subjective reports about efficacy of induction, and tools for recording physiological indices of contagion. While previous research was based on short-term manipulations where participants, typically University students, were artificially assigned to the role of leader or follower here we aim to expand current knowledge by: i) testing participants who belong to a specific category (i.e. women or men, transformational vs transactional leaders, or subordinate followers who work either in-person or remotely) not because of a short-term manipulation but because of their long-term role in a given organization; ii) adopting experimental paradigms for inducing emotional contagion in a naturalistic setting; iii) combining a number of physiological variables acquired with state-of-the-art methodologies (e.g. thermal imaging for recording autonomic changes triggered by watching emotionally charged movies) with subjective reports of mood changes and measures of interindividual differences in susceptibility to contagion. The high-degree of ecologicity of our approach may inspire application studies where spreading of positive emotions and control of negative ones may lead to improved workplace interpersonal dynamics
