The Role of Emotional Contagion in Interpersonal Communication: A Research on Teacher-Student Communication

Interpersonal communication is central to our everyday lives. Emotional awareness plays an important role in successful interpersonal communication. In this study, emotional contagion was examined from the perspective of interpersonal communication. Drawing on emotional contagion theory, it was hypothesized that followers’ portrayal of verbal and non-verbal affective cues can be ‘caught on’ by their teacher and that the teacher will adopt a similar affective state to those expressed by their students. Qualitative research technique was used and in this study, focus group interviews were conducted to establish causal evidence that emotional contagion may occur. The study was conducted at a vocational school in Kartal with 6 vocational teachers and 6 other teachers. Through this qualitative study, we sought to enhance the representativeness of the findings from the focus group interviews and provide evidence of emotional contagion occurring in actual teacher-student relationships. Consequently, the findings from this study confirmed that emotional contagion can indeed occur in classes and suggest some important implications for communication processes and outcomes. The present study aims to make a microanalysis and avoids making a generalization about all teachers but it must be taken into consideration that the experiences of teachers who are participants of the focus group study is a representation of reality