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Recently, emotion is regaining attention from researchers as a social phenomenon between individuals; not only as a phenomenon inside an individual. By expressing
\nemotion, people communicate information like personality, situation and
\nthoughts. In addition, it is used as a trigger to elicit the observer’s emotion. This phenomenon, of a person’s emotion transfers to the observer, is called the “primitive emotional contagion”, and it is done unconsciously and automatically. Emotional contagion can also happen consciously, when the observer is informed by conversation or text-based communication.

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Nowadays, people can express one’s emotion to distant others by using nonverbal cues like emoji and symbols to express one’s emotion to an opponent. However, there is currently limited research on the relationship between nonverbal cues and observers’ emotions in a non-face-to-face (non-F2F) situation.

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The objective of this research is to investigate whether emotional contagion will
\noccur when an opponent’s emotion is displayed in a non-F2F situation. Moreover,
\nthe relationship between evoked emotion (of observers) and four different visual cues (words, symbol, emoji, and portrait picture); and the relationship between evoked emotion and participants’ closeness were investigated in this research. Two experiments were conducted for the study: a laboratory experiment, and a scenario experiment. Both experiments used visual cues as a stimulus that represent the opponent’s emotion, and measured participants’ emotion in different conditions, where the displayed valence and visual cues are different. Furthermore, the closeness between participants were measured for the scenario experiment, to see if there is a difference between participants’ relationship and evoked emotion. Results of this study show that, when a person’s emotion is displayed in a non F2F situation, there are periods of which the observers feel the same emotion as the person who first express their emotion. Furthermore, emotional contagion was stronger when the visual cue was a face-like. Results also showed that when the participants’ relationship was close, emotional contagion was stronger.

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Affective Lab