Postural reactions can be influenced by concomitant tasks or different contexts and are modulated by a higher order motor control. Recent studies investigated postural changes determined by motor contagion induced by action observation (chameleon effect) showing that observing a model in postural disequilibrium induces an increase in healthy subjects' body sway. Parkinson's disease (PD) is asso...

BACKGROUND Several studies bring evidence that action observation elicits contagious responses during social interactions. However automatic imitative tendencies are generally inhibited and it remains unclear in which conditions mere action observation triggers motor behaviours. In this study, we addressed the question of contagious postural responses when observing human imbalance. METHODOLO...

Spatial contagion occurs when the perceived suitability of neighbouring habitat patches is not independent. As a result, organisms may colonize less-preferred patches near preferred patches and avoid preferred patches near non-preferred patches. Spatial contagion may thus alter colonization dynamics as well as the type and frequency of post-colonization interactions. Studies have only recently ...

Studies of spatial patterns of landscapes are useful to quantify human impact, predict wildlife effects, or describe various landscape features. A robust landscape index should quantify two components of landscape diversity: composition and configuration. One category of landscape index is the contagion index. Some landscape ecologists promote the use of relative contagion indices. It is demons...

There is a lot of evidence for the phenomenon describing the spread of emotion from one person to another, called emotional contagion. Although there is a large body of research on this topic, research containing evidence for factors that moderate the process of emotional contagion, is limited and inconclusive. Furthermore most of these studies are done in a dyadic lab-setting and consequently ...

We test whether the sharp increase in sovereign spreads of euro-area countries with respect to Germany after the explosion of the Greek crisis was due to deteriorating macroeconomic and fiscal fundamentals or to some form of financial contagion. Our analysis includes indicators of domestic and external imbalances which were mostly disregarded by previous studies, and distinguishes between inves...

Emotions are believed to converge both through emotional mimicry and social appraisal. The present study compared contagion of anger and happiness. In Experiment 1, participants viewed dynamic angry and happy faces, with facial electromyography recorded from the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii as emotional mimicry. Self-reported emotional experiences were analyzed as emotional conta...

A longstanding tradition in the humanities holds that a writer's inspiration is infectious, but this thesis has not been tested. We hypothesized that (a) inspiration is infectious, such that inspired writers are more inspiring to the average reader; (b) contagion is mediated by the insightfulness of the text; and (c) contagion is moderated by readers' openness to experience, such that open read...