Prof. Lyle Ungar from the University of Pennsylvania agreed to be our invited speaker at WASSA 2021.

Using language to study emotional contagion

Abstract: The words people use not only reveal their happiness, anger, depression, and empathy toward others; they also influence the people they communicate with, changing their moods and language. Language thus drives emotional contagion and allows us to measure it. We present case studies in which people experience different amounts of emotional contagion based on two factors: 1) Their empathy style: The words people use on Facebook, when correlated with their scores on empathy-measuring questionnaires, reveal empathy-driven emotional contagion. 2) Their level of depression: SMS messages from cell phones show that although depressed people use more sad, negative, and angry language, the texts they receive only show more anger than texts to non-depressed people, suggesting that anger may be more contagious than sadness.