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Emotion Regulation of Others and Self (EROS): A Collaborative Research Network

Grant reference: RES-060-25-0044

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Conference paper/presentation details

Dynamics of in-person communication and perception of emotions in a social network
People may avoid interacting with persons who are depressed or coping with intense negative emotion. However, it is uncertain whether such processes operate at more normative levels of emotion. For the present study, a cohort of undergraduate students (N = 34) was tracked for three weeks while they completed projects in small teams. Because social network methods allow a more nuanced causal analysis of interdependence among people, their social behavior, and the pattern of relations among them, a stochastic actor-oriented model of social network dynamics was used to test whether participants avoided communicating with peers who were perceived to experience negative emotions. In weekly surveys, the participants reported their perceptions of others’ negative and positive emotional experiences and their in-person communication with their peers. These data were then mapped into three overlapping social networks. The statistical analysis were based on computer simulations conducted with RSiena. The findings suggest that at the network level, communication patterns were linked with perceptions of positive—not negative— emotions. Rather than actively avoiding peers with negative emotions, participants preferred to communicate with peers who were seen to experience positive emotions. Communication and positive emotion also had a reciprocal relationship: in-person communication with peers increased perception of their positive emotion and vice versa. In addition to empirical findings, the study highlights the importance of studying emotion as a primarily relational phenomena that unfolds over time in a changing social environment: emotions are shaped by networks and networks shape emotion.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/cere2012/downloads/cere-2012-programme.pdf
English

Primary contributor

Author Ilmo van der Löwe

Additional details

02 May 2012
Consortium of European Research on Emotion (CERE) European conference on emotion
Canterbury
4th
02 May 2012

Cite this outcome

Harvard

van der Löwe, Ilmo Dynamics of in-person communication and perception of emotions in a social network. Consortium of European Research on Emotion (CERE) European conference on emotion, 4th, Canterbury, 2012.

Vancouver

van der Löwe Ilmo. Dynamics of in-person communication and perception of emotions in a social network. Consortium of European Research on Emotion (CERE) European conference on emotion, 4th, Canterbury, 2012.