Departmental Seminar: Explaining emotional convergence: Contagion, social appraisal and beyond

This talk focuses on episodes where two or more people’s emotions become more similar over time.  These convergent effects are usually explained in terms of emotional contagion or social appraisal.  I argue that neither account is capable of explaining the full range of interpersonal and intragroup findings.  In directly involving social situations, people’s developing orientations to what is happening often become aligned as a result of processes of dynamic reciprocal adjustment operating prior to the consolidation of any articulated appraisal or registration of emotional meaning.

Professor Brian Parkinson obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Manchester University and took a number of teaching and research positions at other UK universities before moving to Oxford in 2001.  His research focuses on the social effects and functions of emotions.  He is the author of Ideas and Realities of Emotion (1995) and Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People (2019) and co-author of Emotion in Social Relations (2005) and Changing Moods (1996).  He also currently co-edits the Cambridge University Press book series: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction.

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