Relationship Between Emotional Contagion, Personality, and Emotion Regulation Among University Students

This study examined the relationships between Big Five personality traits, emotion regulation difficulties, and emotional contagion among 250 Pakistani university students. Using a cross-sectional correlational design, participants completed the IPIP-50, DERS-18, and CAPS-E. Analyses included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, independent-samples t-tests, and multiple regression. Emotion regulation difficulties were positively associated with overall and negative emotional contagion and were the only statistically significant unique predictor of negative emotional contagion in the regression model. Personality traits were largely unrelated to emotional contagion, apart from small positive associations involving extraversion. No statistically significant gender differences were found. The findings suggest an association between emotion regulation difficulties and susceptibility to negative emotional contagion; the study design does not establish causation. This manuscript is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.