Emotional Transmission in the Daily Lives of Families: A New Paradigm for Studying Family Process

This collection of articles brings together studies that examine the transmission of emotions between family members. All studies employ repeated diary or experience-sampling data to examine daily within-person and within-family variations in emotional experience. Emotional transmission is evaluated by assessing circumstances in which events or emotions in one family member's immediate experience show a consistent, predictive relationship to subsequent emotions or behaviors in another family member. This introduction places this empirical paradigm in the context of other approaches to research, discusses research methods and statistical procedures for studying emotional transmission, and reviews the major findings obtained thus far in this body of research. We argue that this empirical paradigm provides a promising tool for understanding emotional processes within the daily ecology of family and community life. Key Words: emotions, emotional transmission, family processes, family systems. The family is a nexus ot daily interchanges, both among household members and between these members and external settings, such as parents' places of work, children's schools, and other community institutions. Each day family members participate in semi-regular patterns of interaction with each other and with people and systems outside the family. In these interchanges, family members are affected by and affect others, sometimes in repeated ways. A hyperactive child, for example, may create repeated experiences of frustration for a parent that contribute to the parent's development of headaches. A parent experiencing sexual harassment at work may have frequent distress that is brought home and regularly affects her or his spouse and children in the evening. Some families may show repeated "chain reactions" in which stress enters the family through one member and is passed in a predictable sequence to others (Boss, 1987). Mapping the paths of transmission in these daily interchanges can reveal information about how the family system functions, as well as how the family affects individual health and well-being. In this collection of articles, we are concerned with daily patterns in which emotions or closely related phenomena are transmitted between family members and across settings. Emotions are an important medium to examine because they influence and can limit individuals' perceptions, thought processes, and behavior (Clore, Schwartz, & Conway, 1994; Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991), as well as affect health via emotional physiology (Lovallo, 1997). Strong negative emotions, for example, dispose parents to view children's behavior with disapproval, block their recollection of constructive parenting strategies, and increase their rate of punitive parenting responses (Bradbury & Fincham, 1987; Dix, 1991). Adults' experiences of repeated negafive emotion are related to the development of heart disease (Sherwood & Turner, 1992) and to depression in their children (Downey & Coyne, 1990). Thus, chain reactions by which distress moves through a family have multiple effects. Secondhand emotions alter the thought, behavior, and physiology of individual family members. These, in turn, may have aggregate effects on the functioning of the family as a whole. This propagation of emotion within families is recognized by many areas of family scholarship. Research on marital relationships, work and family, family stress, parenting, and family therapy posits that family members have daily effects on each other's emotions. Until recently, however, researchers have lacked empirical models for directly examining these paths of influence during daily family life. The construct of emotional transmission provides a promising new empirical paradigm for understanding these daily paths of interchange. Emotional transmission occurs when events or emotions in one family member's immediate daily experience show a consistent predictive relationship to subsequent emotions or behaviors in another family member. …