Emotional Contagion at the Counter
Studies of service encounters split on whether a staff member's mood reaches the customer. A staged encounter found that genuine feeling moved customers and extra smiling did not.
Answer to the question
Do moods spread between staff and customers?
Sometimes, and the evidence is mixed. A 2001 study found customers felt more positive and rated service higher when employees showed more positive emotion. A 2006 staged encounter found that the amount of smiling did not change customers' emotions, while genuineness did. Another 2006 study found satisfaction followed customers' judgement of the service, not their own mood.
Key takeaways
- Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and colleagues found in 2006, in a staged encounter with 223 consumers, that how much actors smiled did not change customers' emotions, while whether the display was genuine did.
- Sigal Barsade found in 2002 that moods spread among managers in laboratory groups, and that a positive mood improved cooperation and reduced conflict.
- Patricia Barger and Alicia Grandey found in 2006, with 173 customers in real encounters, that customers' smiles followed the employee's, yet satisfaction was explained by appraisals of service quality and not by the customer's own mood.
- Will Guidara's memoir assumes staff feeling reaches the table, and none of its eleven endnotes cites research on mood. A 2014 test on 689,003 Facebook users found contagion through text of at most two hundredths of a standard deviation.
Will Guidara's restaurant memoir, Unreasonable Hospitality, leans on a maxim that it hedges itself: people never forget how you made them feel, a line the book calls "often (but probably incorrectly) attributed" to a celebrated writer. The maxim assumes a feeling can pass from the person serving to the person served, and the book credits a practice that puts staff ahead of guests and investors. Psychologists call the passing of a feeling between people emotional contagion. Studies of service encounters disagree about whether it carries a mood from staff to customers, and the evidence that cuts hardest against the memoir's assumption is the place to start.
Smiling actors left customers' moods unchanged
Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and colleagues staged a service encounter in which actors played the employees and 223 consumers played the customers, reported in the Journal of Marketing in 2006. The actors varied how much they smiled and whether they faked the feeling or worked to feel it. How much they smiled had no effect on customers' emotions. Whether the display was genuine did.
The paper's title pairs emotional contagion with emotional labour, the work of managing a displayed feeling as part of a job. The authors read the result as a failure of simple, automatic emotional contagion, in which the display alone would carry the feeling. The employee's emotions still reached customers' assessments of the interaction and their relationship with the provider. What carried them was the genuineness of the display, and the amount of smiling added nothing.
The result cuts against the memoir's assumption at its most literal. A staff member who looks cheerful, on this evidence, passes on very little by looking cheerful.
Moods that do pass between people
Elaine Hatfield and colleagues set out the standard account of emotional contagion in a 1993 paper and a 1994 book. People automatically copy the facial expressions, voices and postures of those around them, the copying feeds back into their own feeling, and they catch a faint version of the other person's state. Mimicry, feedback and contagion are the three steps.
Sigal Barsade tested the spread of moods in groups in 2002. Managers made decisions together in a laboratory while a trained confederate displayed different moods. Moods spread among the group members. A positive mood improved cooperation, reduced conflict and raised participants' perceptions of how well they had performed. The pleasantness and the energy of the displayed mood did not produce the differences in spread that she had predicted. The setting matters for what carries over: the groups were managers working through a decision together, a longer and closer encounter than a transaction at a till.
The feedback step is the weaker one. It rests on the facial feedback idea, that a forced expression changes how a person feels. A registered replication reported in 2016 ran 17 direct replications of the classic pen-in-the-teeth study and found a difference of 0.03 units on a ten-point scale, against 0.82 in the original. That tests one version of the step, the effect of a forced expression on how funny cartoons seem, and says nothing about mimicry at a till. Barsade's result stands apart from it, because it shows that moods spread and is silent on why.
A 2014 experiment on 689,003 Facebook users shows how little signal a shift needs. Emotional posts were filtered out of users' News Feeds. Users shown fewer positive posts wrote fewer positive words and more negative ones, and users shown fewer negative posts showed the reverse. The authors concluded that emotions spread through networks without in-person contact or nonverbal cues. The effects were small, with sizes of at most two hundredths of a standard deviation in the full text. A feed carries words and no faces, so it cannot say what a face adds at a counter.
Customers treat a smile as evidence
S. Douglas Pugh's 2001 paper in the Academy of Management Journal proposed that customers catch the affect of employees. When employees showed more positive emotion, customers reported feeling more positive afterwards and rated the quality of the service higher. He also found that busy transactions, and employees' own natural expressiveness, shaped how much emotion employees displayed in the first place.
A 2006 study in the same journal by Patricia Barger and Alicia Grandey asked what carried the link. Independent coders rated the strength of employees' and customers' smiles at three points in real service encounters, and 173 customers completed surveys afterwards. Mimicry was supported: customers' smiles followed the employee's. Satisfaction took a different path. Only customers' appraisals of service quality, and not their own mood, fully accounted for the link between the employee's smiling and the customer's satisfaction.
Two accounts sit side by side here. In one, the mood travels and colours the verdict. In the other, the customer reads the display as evidence about the service and reaches a verdict by judgement. Barsade's groups support the first for what a group feels, Barger and Grandey's customers support the second for satisfaction, and Pugh's customers showed both a lifted mood and a higher rating.
| Study | Setting | What moved with the employee's display | What did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hennig-Thurau and colleagues, 2006 | Staged encounter, 223 consumers, actors as employees | Customers' emotions, when the display was genuine | Customers' emotions, with more smiling |
| Pugh, 2001 | Service encounters | Customers' positive feeling and rated service quality | Not reported in the abstract |
| Barger and Grandey, 2006 | Real encounters, 173 customer surveys | Customers' smiles, and satisfaction through service quality appraisals | Satisfaction through customers' own mood |
| Barsade, 2002 | Laboratory groups of managers | Group mood, cooperation and perceived performance | Predicted differences by pleasantness and energy |
The memoir's bet on staff feeling
The maxim at page 10 is the book's emotional premise. Its central distinction is between service and hospitality, a line he credits to a job candidate he did not hire: "Service is black and white; hospitality is color" (p. 5). The book's account of enlightened hospitality puts staff ahead of guests and investors (p. 24). Read against the studies above, that order is a bet on the first link in a chain: how the staff member feels decides what reaches the table.
Service is black and white; hospitality is color
The book does not frame the bet as emotional contagion, and it names no mechanism for it. Eight of its eleven endnotes (pp. 259 to 260) are newspaper reviews of the restaurant.
None of the eleven points to research on mood or emotion. What the book offers instead is eleven years in one restaurant, recorded by the man who ran it. That kind of record cannot separate a mood that spread from a standard that was enforced, while the service studies have the opposite profile, with clean measures and single encounters.
The one chapter that treats the staff's own state as a hazard is the chapter on restoring balance (p. 155). A cook arrives ten hours early in a state of exhaustion, and the leadership reads it as a sign that ambition has overrun the culture. The remedy is deliberate slowing, which is a decision about staff condition made before any guest is involved.
The nearest outside support for putting staff first is Barsade's finding that a positive mood improved cooperation within a working group. It describes moods moving between colleagues. The step from team to customer is the one Pugh, Barger and Grandey, and Hennig-Thurau measured, and their results disagree about how much of it is mood and how much is judgement.
A manager's reading of the evidence
A display is not the carrier: the amount of smiling changed nothing in the staged encounter, and the genuineness of the display did. Customers also judge the service as well as catching the mood, so satisfaction can follow their appraisal of what they received. Within a team, moods do spread, and a positive one helped cooperation, which is where staff-first ordering finds its support.
Pugh's finding about busy transactions matters here, because it puts a working condition upstream of the display. A customer can only catch what an employee shows, and an employee's display depends partly on how pressed they are and partly on their own temperament.
For emotional contagion to matter at a counter, three things have to hold: the display has to be genuine, the customer has to catch it, and the customer has to let it count towards the verdict. The studies support the first two in part. Barger and Grandey's data do not support the third, since satisfaction followed the appraisal of service quality and not the customer's mood.
Judge the result by what customers conclude about the service, since that is where satisfaction was decided.
Manage the state of the person serving, not the width of the smile.
Common questions
Do moods spread between staff and customers?
Sometimes, and the evidence is mixed. A 2001 study found customers felt more positive and rated service higher when employees showed more positive emotion. A 2006 staged encounter found that the amount of smiling did not change customers' emotions, while genuineness did. Another 2006 study found satisfaction followed customers' judgement of the service, not their own mood.
What is emotional contagion in customer service?
Emotional contagion is the largely automatic spread of a feeling from one person to another through copied expressions, voices and postures. In service, it describes an employee's mood reaching a customer. Studies show emotional contagion in laboratory groups, while at the service counter the results split between mood transfer and the customer's own judgement of the service.
Can emotional contagion happen online?
A 2014 experiment on 689,003 Facebook users found that changing the emotional content of News Feeds shifted the emotional words people wrote. The effects were small, with sizes of at most two hundredths of a standard deviation. The study shows that moods can travel through text, and it does not compare that route with a face-to-face one.
Sources
Guidara, W. (2022; this edition 2026). Unreasonable Hospitality. London: Ebury Edge. Pp. 5, 10, 24 and the endnotes at pp. 259 to 260. A practitioner memoir; used for the premise only.
Hennig-Thurau, T., Groth, M., Paul, M., & Gremler, D. D. (2006). 'Are all smiles created equal? How emotional contagion and emotional labor affect service relationships.' Journal of Marketing, 70(3), 58-73. Read at the level of the abstract and a publisher summary.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). 'Emotional contagion.' Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96-100; and Emotional Contagion (1994), Cambridge University Press.
Barsade, S. G. (2002). 'The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior.' Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644-675. doi:10.2307/3094912. Read at the level of the abstract.
Wagenmakers, E.-J., Beek, T., Dijkhoff, L., Gronau, Q. F., et al. (2016). 'Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988).' Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(6), 917-928. doi:10.1177/1745691616674458. Read at the level of the abstract.
Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). 'Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790. doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111. Effect sizes as reported in the full text.
Pugh, S. D. (2001). 'Service with a smile: Emotional contagion in the service encounter.' Academy of Management Journal, 44, 1018-1027. doi:10.2307/3069445. Read at the level of the abstract.
Barger, P. B., & Grandey, A. A. (2006). 'Service with a smile and encounter satisfaction: Emotional contagion and appraisal mechanisms.' Academy of Management Journal, 49(6), 1229-1238. doi:10.5465/AMJ.2006.23478695. Read at the level of the abstract.