Collective emotions: perspectives from cognitive and social sciences

To describe the emotions associated with group, crowds, organizations and nations, the social sciences, psychology and philosophy have developed theories of collective emotion. We invite experts from these different fields to share the latest advances in research on collective emotions. What are collective emotions? What are their social, psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms? How and why do people share emotions? This public event is aimed at researchers, students and anyone interested in the study of collective emotions, whatever their discipline.

Organizers: Victor Chung (Institut Jean-Nicod, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles), Julie Grèzes (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles), Elisabeth Pacherie (Institut Jean-Nicod)

Funders: ED540, Inserm, CNRS

9:15 – Opening

9:30 – Social sharing of emotion and collective emotion - Bernard Rimé (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Since the early 1990s, research under the concept of 'social sharing of emotions' has explored how emotional experiences generally extend into social interactions, where the affected individual shares their emotions with others. Such interactions are observed to foster closeness between those involved. Is this effect driven by the same processes that generate the sense of 'we' in collective gatherings and shared effervescence? Recently, a proposed taxonomy of collective emotions has dismissed the social sharing of emotions from the realm of collective emotions (Thonhauser, 2022). I will discuss this position by examining, on the one hand, emotion sharing in interpersonal situations in relation to the concept of Perceived Positivity Resonance (e.g., Fredrickson, 2016; Brown et al., 2023), and on the other hand, emotion sharing in collective situations and the concept of Perceived Emotional Synchrony (e.g., Pizarro et al., 2022; Rimé & Paez, 2023).

10:30 – Coffee break
11:00 – Interpersonal emotion convergence: Beyond contagion and social appraisal - Brian Parkinson (University of Oxford)

This talk focuses on episodes where two or more people’s emotions become more similar over time. These convergent effects are usually explained in terms of emotional contagion or social appraisal. I argue that neither account is capable of explaining the full range of interpersonal and intragroup findings. In directly involving social situations, people’s developing orientations to what is happening often become aligned as a result of processes of dynamic reciprocal adjustment operating prior to the consolidation of any articulated appraisal or registration of emotional meaning.

12:00 – Lunch break

13:00 – Interpersonal physiological synchrony: a marker or mechanism of shared attention and shared emotion? - Ivana Konvalinka (Technical University of Denmark)

Interpersonal physiological synchrony (IPS) has been proposed to be both a marker of joint attention, elicited by attention to common stimuli or exogenous sources, in the absence of social context; and a mechanism underlying shared emotion (or arousal), emerging from a reciprocal exchange of emotional signals between people (endogenous sources). In this talk, I will present four lab-based and real-world empirical studies investigating how IPS is modulated by joint vs. shared attention and shared emotion, and by the closeness of those we share experiences with. The results suggest that in low-arousal settings, shared attention amplifies neural processing of stimuli but not necessarily emotional experiences, and that it is marked by increased IPS, driven by both exogenous and endogenous sources; while in high-arousal settings, shared attention amplifies emotional experiences and IPS, which are both further enhanced by social closeness.

14:00 – Coffee break

14:30 – The Regulation of Shared Emotions from Within: A Co-Regulation Approach - Mikko Salmela (University of Helsinki, University of Copenhagen)

We provide a theoretical account of the co-regulation of shared emotions within small egalitarian groups such as work groups and research teams. Previous research has not addressed co-regulation of shared emotions and it is unclear whether or to what extent current models of emotion regulation are applicable in this task. To remedy these shortcomings, the paper develops an account of emotional co-regulation (ECR) in two steps. First, we refine the idea of shared emotions in egalitarian groups, positing shared emotions as structures of participatory emotions that rely on group-identifying co-experiencers. Second, we propose that ECR is a collaborative endeavor where participants of a shared emotion collectively strive to change their emotion. We show that ECR develops along two axes (the controlled-spontaneous axis and the explicit-implicit axis) and that it may utilize all nodal points of Gross’s process model of emotion regulation.

15:30 – Roundtable

16:30 – Closing remarks

Ivana Konvalinka, Associate Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Section for Cognitive Systems, DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

Ivana Konvalinka is an Associate Professor Technical University of Denmark (DTU Compute) where she leads the SINe Lab. Her research in the field of social neurosciences investigates intra- and inter-personal mechanisms underlying mutual social interaction at a behavioural, neural, and physiological level. She works on developing joint action paradigms and multivariate methods for quantifying two-person processes. In particular, she is interested in i) how people coordinate their actions in real time, ii) what neurophysiological mechanisms underlie mutual interaction, particularly how simultaneous brain recordings (i.e. dual EEG) can help better understand the neural basis of social interaction, and iii) the mechanism by which people's physiological (i.e. cardiac) signals couple together during action coordination and action observation.

Brian Parkinson, Professor, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Brian Parkinson is Professor of Social Psychology. His research focuses on how our emotions affect other people (and how they affect other people’s emotions). He uses experimental, observational, and diary-based methods. The guiding idea of his work is that emotions align and configure our relations with other people and regulate their orientations towards objects and events in the environment (relation alignment). Attention to the interpersonal context for emotion expression may permit us to understand some of the maladaptive effects of certain otherwise functionally useful emotions, and to improve emotional communication in close relationships. His studies have focused on how expressed worry or anxiety affects other people. In his recent research, he is particularly interested in how economic game outcomes influence regulation of facial communication and how game partners perceive regulated expressions in different contexts.

Bernard Rimé, Emeritus Professor, Institut de Recherches en Sciences Psychologiques, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgique

Bernard Rimé currently works at the Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research spans Emotion, Health Psychology and Social Psychology. He investigates the links existing between emotions and social communication. His current research examines individual and collective effects of collective emotional expression in mass gatherings such as civil or religious ceremonies, commemorations, collective festivities, and sporting, musical, folk, or socio-political events, with a focus on relationships between such collective processes and individual/community well-being. Other studies currently conducted address emotions and collective memory in intergroup conflicts.

Mikko Salmela, Associate Professor, Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Centre for Subjectivity Research, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Mikko Salmela works as an Associate Professor at the Center for Subjective Research, on the research project "Who are We", led by Professor Dan Zahavi. He is an expert of empirically informed philosophy of emotions, both individual and collective, and he is currenly pursuing theoretical research on the relevance of emotions in identity formation and group identification processes, with applications in political psychology.

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