Blackwell Reference Online

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Speculation about how moods and emotions affect group life have been an important part of psychological inquiry for decades. The concept of emotional “contagion” has been with us since Le Bon's (1896) early writings on crowd behavior and McDougall's (1923) writings on the group mind. Patterns of emotional behavior were also an important part of group development theories since the writings of Bion (1961) and Tuckman (1965). In addition, the emotional strain involved in task performance was an integral part of Bales' (1950) theory of equilibrium processes and phase movement in groups.Over the past few decades, individual-level researchers investigating social phenomena have acknowledged that moods and emotions have profound influences on many areas of cognitive functioning. For example, mood has been found to affect aspects of persuasion and person perception, and it appears to do so through influencing the processes of memory, attention, and type of information processing (Forgas, 1992). More recently, however, it has been acknowledged that many aspects of affective phenomena have interpersonal antecedents and consequences (Wallbott & Sherer, 1986), and that emotional expression has an important impact on social interaction. Thus research should logically be directed toward examining the effects of mood and emotion on interpersonal interaction among group members.The purpose ... log in or subscribe to read full text