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The concept of emotional contagion is considered as one of the important concepts. This concept emerged at the hand of the American psychologist Elaine Hatfield. The emotional contagion is the tendency towards the spontaneous imitation of facial, verbal and vocal expressions, configuration (the body), the movements and their concurrence with other persons successively and emotionally like (happiness, love, sadness, attention, fear and anger). Psychologists were interested in observing the emotional contagion which is considered very important in personal relationships in that it is regarded as a brick of the basic construction for the interaction among humans, thus the people should have the minimum simulation and synchronization skills if they want to do a smooth social interaction. Hatfield has suggested that there are three patterns of imitation: facial, vocal and configurational, and there is a second process in addition to imitation which may affect the emotional contagion, i.e. the feedback which includes self-perception, social situation perception and the required social behavior. The emotional contagion as Hatfield pointed out is as picking up the external emotions and trying to integrate them with the internal emotions to get out with a formula that is similar to what the individual sees. In this sense, Hatfield states that the emotional contagion is only done by men and women with two conditions: 1-The emotional imitation (contagion) should be for the emotions of a person loved by the individual. 2-The emotional imitation (contagion) should be for the emotions of an individual looks like him in belief, thinking and community, in that the imitated individual then feels living the same emotional and sentimental states of nearby individuals. Although the emotional contagion has its important and positive social and personal roles, yet it has its negative aspects for many persons with a high emotional contagion has a high tendency to imitate others unconsciously, so they are prepared to accept suggestion, polarized emotionally and are victims to negative thoughts, beliefs and directions that devastate the values and disperse the social identity. The research aims are defined to the following aspects: 1-Measuring the emotional contagion for the academic students. 2- Measuring the differences in the emotional contagion according to two variables, the sex (males- females) and specialty (scientific-humanitarian). The research sample consisted of (400) male and female students and was selected by the random class method from eight colleges at the University of Baghdad, four colleges of humanitarian specialty and four colleges of scientific specialty. As to the emotional contagion variable, the researcher adopted Hatfield scale which contained (18) items. In the current research, the translation validity and the facial validity were extracted and the scale items were subjected to analysis by the style of two extremist groups and the relationship of the item with the total score of the scale. No Item was deleted; therefore, the scale with its (18) items were accepted. The scale was characterized with the indicators of facial validity and construction validity. The scale reliability coefficient was verified by the method of internal consistency (Alfa Cronbach coefficient), thus it was (0.85) and by the split half method, thus it was (0.72), then it was corrected by the equation of Spearman Brown, thus it was (0.78) and by retest, thus it was (0.79). The research concluded that: 1-The academic students had high cognitive contagion. 2-There was a difference in the cognitive contagion according to two variables, the sex (males- females) for the interest of females and specialty (scientific-humanitarian) for the interest of humanitarian.
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