The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect

Amit  Goldenberg; Erika  Weisz; Timothy D. Sweeney; Mina  Cikara; James  Gross

Article | Psychological Science | Forthcoming

The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect

by Amit Goldenberg, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara and James Gross

Abstract

How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can only focus their attention on some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions, and that this generates a crowd emotion amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response as more extreme than it is. Study 1 (N = 50) documents the crowd amplification effect. Study 2 (N = 50) replicates the effect even when we increase exposure time. Study 3 (N = 50) uses eye-tracking to show that attentional bias to emotional faces drives amplification. These findings have important implications for many domains in which individuals have to make snap judgments regarding a crowd’s emotionality, from public speaking to controlling crowds.

Keywords: crowds; Emotions; Perception; Judgments; Analysis;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Goldenberg, Amit, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara, and James Gross. "The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect." Psychological Science (forthcoming).

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.

People spend considerable time on digital media, and during this time they are often exposed to others’ emotion expressions. This exposure can lead their own emotion expressions to become more like others’ emotion expressions, a process we refer to as digital emotion contagion. This paper reviews the growing literature on digital emotion contagion. After defining emotion contagion, we suggest that one unique feature of digital emotion contagion is that it is mediated by digital media platforms that are motivated to upregulate users’ emotions. We then turn to measurement, consider the challenges of demonstrating that digital emotion contagion has occurred, and determine how these challenges have been addressed. Finally, we call for a greater focus on understanding when emotion contagion effects will be strong versus weak or nonexistent.

Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | March 2020

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 149, no. 3 (March 2020). View Details

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