Functional Graph Contrastive Learning of Hyperscanning EEG Reveals Emotional Contagion Evoked by Stereotype-Based Stressors

Emotional contagion refers to the sharing of emotional states between individuals, and it has been observed in both animal and human models that the infectivity of negative emotions is much greater than that of positive emotions [1]. Negative emotional contagion has a powerful effect on our relationships - family, friends, teams, etc. - and can lead, for example, to depressive behavior in healthy people who live with depressed individuals. It is urgent to understand the mechanism of emotional contagion, especially negative emotional contagion. Emotional contagion has long been regarded as reflecting a mimicry-based process, for which mimicry of emotional expressions and its consequent feedback function are assumed and can be evoked by higher-order social processes or by a simple emotion-to-action response as well as the primary mimicry-based process [2]. At present, the emotional contagion models mostly adopt behavioral analysis and questionnaires, which are often affected by subjects' subjective factors. They have mainly focused on behavioral experiment such as analysing people's posts containing emotional information to extract affective evidence [3], using the Positive And Negative Affective Schedule (PANAS) scale to measure positive and negative emotions as a quantitive research [4] and the mathematical simulation model of emotional contagion in crowd evacuation [5]. Although behavioral analysis and questionaires can provide valuable insights into emotional contagion, they have limitations in terms of capturing the neural mechanisms, timing, and subtleties of this phenomenon.