The Way You Make Me Feel

How much do individuals consistently influence the way other people feel? Data from 48 work groups suggest there are consistent individual differences both in the emotions that people tend to experience (trait affect) and in the emotions that people tend to elicit in others (trait affective presence). A social relations model analysis revealed that after controlling for emotional contagion, the variance in emotions that people feel is explained by both trait affect (31% of positive affect and 19% of negative affect) and trait affective presence (10% of positive affect and 23% of negative affect). These analyses suggest that affective presence exerts as much influence over interaction partners’ negative feelings as does these interaction partners’ own trait affect. Positive affective presence correlated with greater network centrality, and negative affective presence correlated with lower agreeableness and greater extraversion.