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• Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

  Beyond Emotional Similarity: The Role of Situation-specific Motives

  Amit Goldenberg, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, Jamil Zaki, Danyang Kong, Golijeh Golarai and James J. Gross

  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.

  Keywords: emotion contagion; emotional influence; motivation; group dynamics; Emotions; Situation or Environment; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior;

  Citation:

  Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, Jamil Zaki, Danyang Kong, Golijeh Golarai, and James J. Gross. "Beyond Emotional Similarity: The Role of Situation-specific Motives." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 1 (January 2020): 138–159.  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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