Sanaz Mobasseri Gives Talk about Gender and Emotional Contagion in the Workplace

Recently, BU Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, Questrom, and Hariri Institute for Computing Junior Faculty Fellow, Sanaz Mobasseri gave a talk on her research titled “Is Susceptibility to Emotional Contagion Gendered? Sometimes.” This talk is part of the Wed@Hariri Talk Series where Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellows share their research with the Hariri Institute and Boston University communities.

In her presentation, Sanaz discussed the commonly known stereotype that women are more emotional than men and briefly touched upon the fact that much research has disproved this stereotype. Yet the widely-held belief that women are more susceptible to others’ emotions persists. Sanaz’s research explores susceptibility to emotions in an organization’s emails. More specifically, she investigates whether women, relative to their male colleagues, are more susceptible to negative, rather than positive, emotions. In order to address this research question, Sanaz is using emails from a mid-size technology firm as her main source of data by analyzing the emotional content of the messages sent and replied to by internal colleagues. Throughout the rest of her talk, she also shared her progress in her research about this topic.

Sanaz is a recently appointed Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing. This program recognizes outstanding early-career researchers at Boston University and connects them with the Institute community at large. For more information about the program, please visit the Junior Faculty Fellow program page. For a listing of future talks please visit the Wed@Hariri Event Page.