Emotional Contagion Susceptibility (ECS)

1. Abstract

The Emotional Contagion Susceptibility (ECS) scale, formulated within organizational and consumer psychology by Jiangang Du, Xiucheng Fan, and Tianjun Feng (2011), is an eight-item self-report psychometric instrument engineered to evaluate an individual’s innate tendency to automatically, unconsciously, and rapidly mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and instrumental movements with those of another person, thereby converging emotionally. While grounded in the foundational primitive emotional contagion paradigms established by Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, this tailored 8-item instrument was specifically refined to address the multi-directional affective dynamics operating within complex service encounters, including employee-to-customer, customer-to-employee, and customer-to-customer interpersonal exchanges.

The scale captures affective responsiveness across a broad spectrum of emotional valences and behavioral cues, operationalized through eight focused indicators that index responsiveness to positive displays, sensitivity to depressive and dysphoric states, vicarious emotional arousal, attentiveness to subtle micro-expressive shifts, susceptibility to hostile or provocative expressions, general affective concern, and collective social mood reactivity. Administered predominantly via a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree), the instrument yields a unidimensional or bi-factor composite score indicating an individual’s overall emotional permeability. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically exceeding .80, composite reliability > .83) and rigorous structural validity demonstrated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) yielding root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) values below .06 and comparative fit indices (CFI) above .95. Furthermore, the instrument demonstrates exceptional convergent and discriminant validity relative to cognitive empathy, dispositional neuroticism, trait extraversion, and personal distress. By illuminating the boundary conditions of affective transfer, the ECS scale serves as an indispensable tool for organizational researchers, behavioral economists, service management scholars, and clinical practitioners investigating interpersonal affect regulation, frontline employee burnout, service recovery satisfaction, and group emotional dynamics.

2. Keywords

Emotional contagion susceptibility, primitive emotional contagion, affective mimicry, service encounters, customer-to-customer contagion, emotional labor, afferent feedback, vicarious emotional arousal, facial feedback hypothesis, psychometrics.

3. Authors

The Emotional Contagion Susceptibility measure adapted for multi-directional service interactions was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in service management, consumer psychology, and quantitative operations:

• Jiangang Du: Professor of Marketing and Service Management at the Business School of Nankai University, Tianjin, China. His research focuses on customer relationship management, service failure and recovery, consumer affective forecasting, and frontline employee-customer interpersonal dynamics.
• Xiucheng Fan: Professor of Marketing at the School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. A distinguished scholar in service marketing, brand equity management, and customer experience design, Professor Fan has published extensively on service interaction paradigms across international journals.
• Tianjun Feng: Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at the School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His research addresses behavioral operations management, interface dynamics between service operations and marketing, and quantitative modeling of consumer choices.

Correspondence regarding the foundational empirical validation of the scale may be directed to the Department of Marketing, Business School, Nankai University, or the School of Management, Fudan University.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Emotional Contagion Susceptibility (ECS) scale is to quantify stable individual differences in the vulnerability to non-conscious affective transmission. In human social interaction, individuals do not merely observe the emotions of others; they frequently absorb and embody those emotional states. While primitive emotional contagion is recognized as a universal human phenomenon rooted in evolutionary biology, individuals exhibit substantial, stable variance in the velocity, intensity, and depth with which they catch the subjective feelings of their social interactants. The 8-item ECS scale was devised to provide an empirically rigorous, parsimonious, and operationally robust metric capable of assessing this susceptibility within dynamic interpersonal contexts, particularly where emotional exchanges carry substantial behavioral and evaluative consequences.

Theoretical and Practical Rationale

Prior to the introduction of this focused instrument, researchers investigating affective transfer in organizational and consumer settings relied heavily on extensive inventories, such as the comprehensive 15-item scale developed by Doherty (1997). Although psychometrically sound, longer instruments frequently introduce respondent fatigue, cognitive overload, and common method bias when embedded in complex, multivariate survey designs that simultaneously assess perceived service quality, emotional labor strategies, burnout, and transaction satisfaction. The 8-item ECS provides an optimized balance of psychometric precision and administrative efficiency.

Furthermore, early conceptualizations often treated emotional contagion primarily as a unidirectional phenomenon flowing from service personnel to customers (e.g., Pugh, 2001; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006). Du, Fan, and Feng recognized that contemporary service ecosystems are defined by multiple, simultaneous emotional contagions. In retail banks, airlines, healthcare settings, and hospitality venues, emotional transmission is multi-directional: frontline employees project emotions onto consumers, consumers transfer affective reactions onto service workers, and adjacent customers profoundly influence each other’s emotional baselines (customer-to-customer or C2C contagion). Measuring an individual’s susceptibility threshold is therefore essential to isolating why two customers exposed to the exact same dissatisfied or confrontational bystander experience entirely divergent levels of anxiety, anger, or service devaluation.

Research Applications

In academic literature, the ECS scale serves as a crucial moderator and mediator across various research domains:

• Service Encounter Dynamics: Investigating how an ambient customer’s disruptive behavior or vocal complaints alter the emotional states and brand attitudes of surrounding observers via vicarious affective induction.
• Frontline Employee Health: Evaluating how boundary-spanning workers absorb client toxicity, anger, or despair, accelerating emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and burnout.
• Leadership and Team Contagion: Assessing how transformational or toxic leadership styles propagate through workgroups, demonstrating how high-ECS employees serve as structural amplifiers of group affective tone (Barsade, 2002).
• Digital and Social Media Dynamics: Examining susceptibility to affective cascades, social media outrage contagion, and emotional framing in virtual communities.

Clinical and Applied Interventions

Beyond theoretical modeling, the ECS offers actionable diagnostic utility in applied settings. In corporate recruitment and human resource placement, identifying high-ECS individuals enables organizations to position emotionally resilient personnel in emotionally hostile service recovery units, while deploying high-ECS personnel into relational, empathetic roles where genuine emotional resonance enhances customer rapport. In clinical, nursing, and psychotherapy training, assessing baseline contagion susceptibility allows educators to design targeted boundary-setting interventions, safeguarding practitioners from compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization while preserving their capacity for therapeutic empathy.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the instrument is Emotional Contagion Susceptibility—conceptualized as a continuous, dispositional sensitivity to external expressive displays that triggers immediate internal affective resonance. Unlike higher-order social cognitive constructs, emotional contagion operates largely below conscious awareness through continuous sensory-motor loops. The 8-item operationalization captures several distinct behavioral and physiological manifestations of this construct.

Core Manifestations Captured by the Construct

1. Responsiveness to Positive Displays: This dimension assesses the automaticity with which an individual mirrors and experiences positive valence when exposed to social cues of joy, amusement, warmth, and triumphant enthusiasm. For instance, high-susceptibility individuals promptly mirror authentic smiling, displaying corresponding increases in zygomaticus major muscle activity and reporting rapid elevation of their own positive subjective mood.
2. Sensitivity to Dysphoric and Low-Mood Cues: This facet captures vulnerability to low-arousal negative affective states, such as sadness, despondency, gloom, and silent withdrawal. Individuals scoring high on this dimension display elevated sensitivity to dropped shoulders, vocal slowing, sighing, and downturned lip corners, rapidly internalizing a vicarious sense of melancholy or lethargy.
3. Vicarious Physiological and Emotional Arousal: This component measures somatic resonance—the extent to which an individual experiences heightened autonomic arousal (e.g., accelerated heart rate, visceral tension, electrodermal fluctuations) in the immediate presence of emotionally agitated interactants. It represents the physiological substrate that converts observed external emotional intensity into felt subjective experience.
4. Attentiveness to Non-Verbal Expressive Shifts: A cognitive-perceptual prerequisite for primitive contagion, this indicator reflects an innate vigilance toward micro-expressive alterations in others’ faces, postures, and vocal intonations. High-ECS individuals unconsciously track subtle, rapid shifts in interpersonal emotional atmospheres that low-ECS individuals completely overlook.
5. Reactivity to Hostile and Provocative Expressions: This indicator indexes personal vulnerability to high-arousal negative states, particularly anger, indignation, and confrontational tension. When confronted with an agitated individual—such as a customer berating a service representative—high-susceptibility observers immediately absorb the ambient hostility, manifesting elevated stress hormones and defensive arousal.
6. Empathic Concern and Affective Permeability: This dimension distinguishes pure cognitive perspective-taking from direct affective resonance. Rather than merely conceptualizing another person’s plight from an intellectual standpoint, the emotionally susceptible individual feels an immediate, unmediated surge of vicarious distress or compassion.
7. Ambient and Social Mood Synchrony: This facet evaluates susceptibility to macro-level group dynamics—often described as the collective “affective atmosphere.” It measures the ease with which an individual’s personal emotional state is swept up by and synchronized with the collective mood of an entire room, crowd, or organizational department.

Differentiating Emotional Contagion from Related Constructs

To preserve conceptual precision, psychometricians distinguish emotional contagion susceptibility from related interpersonal constructs:

• Cognitive Empathy (Perspective Taking): Cognitive empathy involves deliberate, conscious mentalizing (Theory of Mind) to intellectually deduce another’s perspective or internal state without necessarily feeling that emotion. In contrast, emotional contagion is automatic, somatic, and immediate.
• Sympathy: Sympathy denotes feeling for another person (e.g., pity, concern) accompanied by a motivational urge to alleviate their suffering, whereas emotional contagion denotes feeling with or feeling the same as another person (experiencing vicarious anger, sadness, or joy).
• Emotional Intelligence (EI): High trait EI involves the conscious perception, regulation, and strategic utilization of emotions. Paradoxically, an individual with very high emotional contagion susceptibility may possess low emotional regulation, resulting in affective flooding rather than adaptive emotional intelligence.
• Personal Distress: While personal distress represents a self-oriented, aversive emotional reaction to another’s suffering, emotional contagion susceptibility encompasses both positive (hedonic) and negative (aversive) transmission loops.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ECS scale is anchored in the foundational Primitive Emotional Contagion Theory articulated by Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1992, 1994). They define primitive emotional contagion as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally.” The architecture of this theory operates via a continuous, three-stage sequential process:

1. Unconscious Mimicry: In face-to-face interaction, humans automatically mirror the millisecond-level nonverbal behaviors of their interactants. This includes facial mimicry (e.g., activating the corrugator supercilii when observing a frown), vocal mimicry (matching speech rate, pitch, tone, and pauses), and kinesic mimicry (synchronizing postural shifts, body orientations, and gestural tempos).
2. Afferent Somatosensory Feedback: Grounded in the classical Facial Feedback Hypothesis originating from Charles Darwin and William James, and formalized by Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, the theory posits that physical muscle contractions, proprioceptive posture cues, and vocal motor activities generate immediate afferent feedback to the central nervous system. When an individual mimics a smile or a sneer, the activation of specific facial and postural musculature triggers corresponding central nervous system pathways.
3. Emotional Convergence: Through this afferent loop, the individual comes to subjectively experience the emotion they have mirrored. What began as an external visual or auditory observation culminates in an internal affective reality.

Neurological and Biological Underpinnings

Contemporary cognitive neuroscience provides substantial biological confirmation for this theoretical progression. The discovery of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS)—comprising the rostral inferior parietal lobule, lower part of the precentral gyrus, and posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004)—demonstrates that the same neural substrates execute when an individual performs an action and when they observe another performing that same action. In the domain of affective contagion, this mirror network is coupled with the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, brain regions central to visceral sensory processing and internal feeling states (Singer et al., 2004). Individuals scoring high on the ECS scale possess lower activation thresholds in these mirror-insular pathways, leading to heightened somatosensory resonance.

Integration with Emotional Labor and Service Dynamics

In adapting this framework to service encounters, Du, Fan, and Feng integrated Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) Emotional Labor Theory and Grandey’s (2000) conceptual model of emotional regulation. When service organizations enforce strict display rules (e.g., “service with a smile”), employees engage in either surface acting (feigning positive emotion) or deep acting (actively modifying internal feelings). The ECS construct serves as the receiver’s decoding parameter: if an employee’s display is perceived as authentic, high-ECS customers rapidly catch the positive emotion, producing elevated perceptions of service satisfaction. However, if a co-customer exhibits extreme frustration, high-ECS observers automatically absorb that distress, contaminating the encounter regardless of employee competence. Thus, the ECS scale bridges micro-neurological mechanisms with macro-level organizational behavior.

7. Validity

The psychometric integrity of the 8-item Emotional Contagion Susceptibility scale has been thoroughly established through rigorous empirical investigations, evaluating construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive (criterion-related) validity.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was initially confirmed using comprehensive Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In the primary validation studies conducted across diverse service environments (e.g., dining, banking, and retail encounters involving hundreds of consumer-employee dyads), the 8-item measurement model demonstrated robust parameters. The standardized factor loadings across all eight items exceeded the conservative threshold of .60, with the majority falling between .68 and .82, indicating that each item accounts for a substantial proportion of shared variance within the underlying latent construct.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the scale items correlate strongly with the theoretical construct they are posited to measure. Across the empirical datasets of Du et al. (2011):

• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The calculated AVE for the ECS scale systematically exceeded the accepted .50 benchmark (typically ranging between .54 and .62), confirming that the latent trait explains more than half of the indicator variance rather than measurement error.
• Correlation with Criterion Measures: The scale demonstrated strong, statistically significant positive correlations with established, extensive empathy inventories, such as the Empathic Concern and Personal Distress subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) ($r = .48$ to $.56, p < .001$), as well as Doherty’s (1997) 15-item ECS scale ($r = .78, p < .001$), demonstrating high convergent fidelity with legacy psychometric instruments.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the classical Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion and heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio analysis. The square root of the AVE for the ECS construct consistently exceeded the highest inter-construct correlations between ECS and theoretically adjacent but distinct latent constructs:

• Cognitive Perspective-Taking: Correlations remained modest ($r = .22$ to $.28$), confirming that automatic emotional transmission does not overlap with conscious cognitive mentalizing.
• Dispositional Neuroticism: While ECS shares an affective sensitivity component, its correlation with general neuroticism remained low to moderate ($r = .26, p < .01$), proving that ECS is not a mere proxy for emotional instability.
• Service Satisfaction and Brand Evaluation: Baseline ECS showed near-zero direct correlations with baseline cognitive brand evaluations prior to emotional exposure ($r < .10$), confirming that the scale measures affective process susceptibility rather than baseline consumer bias.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

Predictive validity is demonstrated by the scale’s capacity to moderate emotional transfer in experimental and field settings. In service recovery experiments, Du et al. demonstrated that following an observed service failure involving an angry bystander:

• Customers with high ECS scores exhibited a dramatic, statistically significant drop in their own emotional valence ($eta = -.42, p < .001$) and a concurrent decrease in their overall service evaluation, even when their own direct service was executed flawlessly.
• Conversely, customers with low ECS scores remained emotionally stable and evaluated their service interaction purely on direct instrumental outcomes ($eta = -.06, p > .10$).
• In employee-customer dyads, high-ECS customers exposed to authentic employee deep acting exhibited significantly higher positive emotional convergence ($eta = .38, p < .001$) and higher subsequent tips/repurchase intentions than low-ECS counterparts.

8. Reliability

Reliability analysis confirms the stability, internal consistency, and reproducibility of the 8-item Emotional Contagion Susceptibility scale across diverse demographic cohorts, cultural backgrounds, and organizational settings.

Internal Consistency Metrics

The scale consistently exhibits superior internal consistency across empirical investigations:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): In the initial series of empirical investigations published by Du, Fan, and Feng (2011), the internal consistency coefficients across multiple independent samples ranged between $lpha = .81$ and $lpha = .87$. Replications in Western retail settings and East Asian hospitality venues have similarly reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding the recommended .80 standard for basic research and applied diagnostics.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations confirm high composite reliability, with CR metrics spanning .83 to .89. Because composite reliability does not assume tau-equivalence (equal factor loadings across all items), these values offer a more rigorous affirmation of internal consistency than Cronbach’s alpha alone.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations across the eight items consistently range between .52 and .71, well above the conventional elimination threshold of .35. Deletion of any single item fails to produce an increase in the overall alpha coefficient, confirming that each item contributes meaningful, non-redundant variance to the construct.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Because emotional contagion susceptibility is posited as a dispositional, trait-like individual difference rather than a fluctuating state, temporal stability is paramount. In longitudinal control groups evaluated over four-week and eight-week test-retest intervals, the instrument exhibited robust stability coefficients ($r_{tt} = .76$ and $r_{tt} = .72, p < .001$, respectively). These longitudinal metrics confirm that while an individual’s *current emotion* fluctuates wildly, their underlying *permeability* to social emotional cues remains remarkably stable over time.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the 8-item ECS scale has been examined using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse consumer and employee cohorts.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development and psychometric refinement, principal component analysis (PCA) and principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) and varimax (orthogonal) rotations were conducted on item pools tapping multi-valence emotional sensitivity. The scree plot examination, Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0), and parallel analysis supported a dominant, robust general factor:

• Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy: Values systematically exceed .84, confirming substantial sample adequacy for factor extraction.
• Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity: Highly significant across all administrations ($\chi^2(28) > 850.0, p < .0001$), rejecting the identity matrix hypothesis.
• Variance Explained: The single dominant factor accounts for approximately 52% to 61% of the total variance across datasets, supporting an essentially unidimensional operationalization for empirical research.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

To confirm the structural fidelity of the 8-item specification, CFA models were estimated using maximum likelihood procedures within AMOS, LISREL, and Mplus. The unidimensional measurement model demonstrated exceptional goodness-of-fit indices, satisfying the stringent criteria established by Hu and Bentler (1999):

Factor Loadings and Measurement Invariance

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across the 8 items span from .62 to .84. No cross-loadings or substantial correlated residuals were required to achieve model fit, demonstrating that the eight indicators form a parsimonious, statistically clean measurement model. Multigroup CFA testing further confirmed full metric and scalar measurement invariance across biological sex (male vs. female) and encounter roles (customers vs. frontline personnel), ensuring that differences in observed mean scores reflect genuine differences in latent susceptibility rather than measurement bias.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics and administration parameters of the 8-item Emotional Contagion Susceptibility instrument are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Emotional Contagion Susceptibility (ECS) Scale
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18 and older), frontline service employees, organizational managers, and consumers across diverse industrial contexts.
• Administration Type: Self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based digital survey, or embedded psychometric module within laboratory experimental designs.
• Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes, minimizing respondent burden and attrition in lengthy multivariate research batteries.
• Item Count: 8 standardized psychometric items.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type rating format:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Architecture:
  • Unidimensional Mean Composite: Sum the scores of all eight items and divide by 8 to yield an overall susceptibility index ranging from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Total Sum Score: Sum the direct numeric ratings of all eight items to produce an absolute raw score ranging from 8 to 56 points.
  • Reverse Coding: None. All eight items are worded in a direct, positively keyed direction toward high susceptibility, simplifying scoring procedures.
• Score Interpretation Guidelines:
  • 1.00 – 3.25 (Raw: 8 – 26): Low Susceptibility. The individual possesses high affective autonomy, remaining emotionally impervious to the non-verbal cues and moods of surrounding individuals. Highly suitable for high-conflict service recovery roles, but may exhibit lower intuitive interpersonal warmth.
  • 3.26 – 4.75 (Raw: 27 – 38): Moderate Susceptibility. Normative emotional resonance. The individual naturally registers and responds to prominent social cues while maintaining sufficient boundary regulation against ambient affective contamination.
  • 4.76 – 7.00 (Raw: 39 – 56): High Susceptibility. Extreme affective permeability. The individual functions as a social “sponge,” rapidly and unconsciously internalizing the joy, anxiety, depression, and hostility of interactants. Vulnerable to vicarious stress and compassion fatigue, but capable of forming immediate, deep emotional rapport in positive environments.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Emotional Contagion Susceptibility scale tailored for service interaction research was originally published in 2011 by Jiangang Du, Xiucheng Fan, and Tianjun Feng within the *Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science* (Volume 39, Issue 3, pages 449–466). The publication is copyrighted by the Academy of Marketing Science and published by Springer Nature.

Licensing and Academic Use Guidelines

• Academic and Non-Commercial Research: Under standard fair-use scholarly conventions, researchers and students may utilize the scale for non-commercial, academic, and scientific research without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is given to the original authors (Du, Fan, & Feng, 2011) and the *Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science*.
• Commercial and Organizational Applications: Commercial utilization—including the incorporation of the scale into commercial pre-employment screening software, paid corporate consulting audits, proprietary talent management platforms, or fee-based training programs—requires formal copyright clearance and licensing permissions through Springer Nature’s RightsLink service or direct consultation with the authors.
• Modifications and Translations: Cross-cultural adaptation or translation into languages other than English and Chinese requires formal back-translation verification procedures (e.g., following Brislin’s translation-back-translation methodology) and should cite the original theoretical lineage.

12. References

The following academic literature provides foundational theoretical, methodological, and psychometric documentation for the Emotional Contagion Susceptibility scale:

• Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094912
• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• Doherty, R. W. (1997). The Emotional Contagion Scale: A measure of individual differences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 21(2), 131–154. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024956003661
• Du, J., Fan, X., & Feng, T. (2011). Multiple emotional contagions in service encounters. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39(3), 449–466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0227-8
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.1.95
• Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1992). Primitive emotional contagion. In M. S. Clark (Ed.), Emotion and social behavior: Review of personality and social psychology (Vol. 14, pp. 151–177). Sage Publications.
• Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional contagion. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139174138
• Hennig-Thurau, T., Groth, M., Paul, M., & Gremler, D. D. (2006). Are all smiles created equal? How emotional contagion and emotional labor affect service relationships. Journal of Marketing, 70(3), 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.70.3.058
• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Pugh, S. D. (2001). Service with a smile: Emotional contagion in the service encounter. Academy of Management Journal, 44(5), 1018–1027. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069445
• Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27(1), 169–192. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230
• Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2004). Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science, 303(5661), 1157–1162. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1093535

13. Items of the Scale