The Contagious And Functional Theories Of Emotional Thinking

Hope states
Snyder, Sympson, Ybasco, Borders, Babyak & Higgins (1996) find that agency and pathways thinking are both necessary for an increased level of hopeful thinking and they interact reciprocally toward the envisaged goal, and inching closer to the goal helps one generate more pathways. They also point that agency and pathways are not synonymous. Snyder et. al. (1996) developed the eight item, dispositional, self-report hope scale. They mention that people are likely to have dispositional hope which comes into action into action across all situations. Further they mention that people may also exhibit state hope that springs into action only at certain intervals and in certain specific situations. State hope therefore is a representation

84). Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson (1994) proposed that emotions can be contagious and pioneered the concept of emotional contagion. They define emotional contagion as a person’s ‘‘tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally’’ (pp. 5). Likewise, McHugo, Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, and Englis (1985), find that when perusing images of people smiling or frowning the viewer’s emotion accorded with the

Functional theories of emotion mention that emotions motivate and drive behavior of the individual (Frijda, 1986). Snyder (2002) proposes that emotions resulting from the perception of success or failure of one’s pursuits towards personal goals will be colored by the perception one has towards the goals. Positive (negative) perceptions hence, will lead to positive (negative) emotions. Furthermore, he explains that the dispositional hope of these individuals will further aid or deter them from pursuing the goal in mind. For example, if an individual perceives that meeting a certain goal is difficult because of impediments/deterrents, the resulting emotion will be stressful, and, the capability to deal with the stress thence produced will be determined by the initial dispositional hope of the individual. Since hope is an emotion, and emotions can be mimicked by others, formally stated the first hypothesis we offer for the study