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• Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | Forthcoming

  Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization

  Amit Goldenberg, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel and James J. Gross

  When exposed to others’ emotional responses, people often make rapid decisions as to whether these others are members of their group or not. These group categorization decisions have been shown to be extremely important to understanding group behavior. Yet, despite their prevalence and importance, we know very little about the attributes that shape these categorization decisions. To address this issue, we took inspiration from ensemble coding research and developed a task designed to reveal the influence of the mean and variance of group members’ emotions on participants’ group categorization. In Study 1, we verified that group categorization decreases when the group’s mean emotion is different from the participant’s own emotional response. In Study 2, we established that people identify a group’s mean emotion more accurately when its variance is low rather than high. In Studies 3 and 4, we showed that participants were more likely to self-categorize as members of groups with low emotional variance, even if their own emotions fell outside of the range of group emotions they saw, and that this preference is seen for judgments of both positive and negative group emotions. In Study 5, we showed that this unique preference for low group emotional variance is special to group categorization and does not appear in a more basic face categorization task. Our studies reveal unexplored and important tendencies in group categorization based on group emotions.

  Keywords: categorization; ensemble coding; summary statistical perception; social cognition; Emotions; Perception; Groups and Teams;

  Citation:

  Goldenberg, Amit, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel, and James J. Gross. "Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (forthcoming). (Pre-published online July 18, 2019.)  View Details

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• Article | Current Directions in Psychological Science | Forthcoming

  Collective Emotions

  Amit Goldenberg, David Garcia, Eran Halperin and James J. Gross

  When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together – whether the emotions are positive or negative, and whether the situations are online or offline – we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which people experience emotions together, there appear to be emergent macro-level affective processes that cannot be readily captured at the individual level. This paper examines these macro-level affective phenomena, termed collective emotions. We open with a general review of research on collective psychological processes. We then define collective emotions and discuss their key features. Next, we focus our attention on the emergent properties of collective emotions and map them using three dimensions: quality, magnitude, and time course. Finally, we discuss pressing open questions and future directions.

  Citation:

  Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, and James J. Gross. "Collective Emotions." Current Directions in Psychological Science (forthcoming).  View Details

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