Emotional Contagion Susceptibility

What it measures

An eight-item scale measuring an individual's tendency to unconsciously or automatically adopt the emotions of others through non-verbal and expressive cues. Items tap responsiveness to others' positive states, sensitivity to low mood cues, vicarious emotional arousal, attentiveness to others' emotional changes, contagion from provocative expressions, general empathic concern, and social mood reactivity. Developed for service research examining how employee and customer emotions spread during service encounters.

Response format

7-point Likert

Scale items

• I feel happy when someone is smiling at me.
• I feel displeased when I see that someone is not in the mood.
• I can't help getting excited when watching touching scenarios.
• I am very keen to capture the emotional changes of other people.
• It makes me irritated immediately when I see other people's provoking expressions.
• I am very concerned about emotional changes of other people.
• It makes me happy to stay together with the people I like.
• It makes my heart beat fast when I see people quarreling furiously.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Single reliability estimate: α = .84 — Du, Fan & Feng (2011, n = 260 Chinese college students). VALIDITY: CFA on all scale items confirmed appropriate loadings with evidence of convergent validity. TRANSLATION NOTE: Scale was developed in Chinese based on concepts from Omdahl & O'Donnell (1999) and Verbeke (1997); English items shown here are translated versions. Some items may read awkwardly in English — researchers using the scale in English-language contexts should review item phrasing for naturalness before deployment. The study authors acknowledged potential translation limitations in the original article.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Du, Jiangang, Xiucheng Fan, and Tianjun Feng (2011). Multiple emotional contagions in service encounters. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39(3), 449–466.

Keywords