Collective Emotions

Amit  Goldenberg; David  Garcia; Eran  Halperin; James J. Gross

Article | Current Directions in Psychological Science | Forthcoming

Collective Emotions

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

Abstract

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.

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Citation:

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

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific emotional motives that influence the tendency to show emotional similarity. To test this possibility, we considered emotional responses to political situations that either called for weak (Studies 1 and 3) or strong (Study 2 and 4) negative emotions. Findings revealed that the motivation to feel weak emotions led people to be more influenced by weaker emotions than their own, whereas the motivation to feel strong emotions led people to be more influenced by stronger emotions than their own. Intriguingly, these motivations led people to change their emotions even after discovering that others’ emotions were similar to their initial emotional response. These findings are observed both in a lab task (Studies 1–3) and in real-life online interactions on Twitter (Study 4). Our findings enhance our ability to understand and predict emotional influence processes in different contexts and may therefore help explain how these processes unfold in group behavior.

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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