Being in a crowd bonds people via physiological synchrony

Abstract

Collective events can generate intense emotions, shape group identities, and forge strong bonds. Do these effects extend to remote participation, and what are the psychological mechanisms underpinning their social power? We monitored psycho-physiological activity among groups of basketball fans who either attended games in-person (in a stadium) or watched games live on television in small groups. In-person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion. Our findings suggest that the social effects of sports depend substantially on the inter-personal dynamics unfolding among fans, rather than being prompted simply by watching the game itself. Given the increasing prevalence of virtual experiences, this has potentially wide-reaching implications for many domains of collective human interaction.

An itsy bitsy audience: Live performance facilitates infants’ attention and heart rate synchronization

“…Interestingly, we found that same-audience infants' heart rates were more synchronized in the live than recorded condition. This is consistent with previous work demonstrating physiological synchronization between adult concert audiences (Bernardi et al, 2017;Czepiel et al, 2021;Upham & McAdams, 2018) and in spectators of sports, movies, and theatrical performances (Ardizzi et al, 2020;Baranowski-Pinto et al, 2022;Golland et al, 2015). This AN ITSY BITSY AUDIENCE synchronization is frequently attributed to similar emotional responding from the audience members, given the association between the autonomic nervous system and emotions e.g., (Porges, 2007).…”

“…The significance of audience synchronization is supported by studies of collective experiences in domains outside of music. For instance, physiological responses of spectators at a basketball game were more aligned than those watching on television with a small group (Baranowski-Pinto et al, 2022).…”

Physiological Synchrony Predict Task Performance and Negative Emotional State during a Three-Member Collaborative Task

“…This has raised concerns among authors [ 11 ] as to whether interactions between pairs of people could be considered a team activity. In this light, our investigation of studies employing three or more members in a team fails to demonstrate the true and consistent effects of PS on task performance [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. For example, Dindar and colleagues [ 12 ] examined the relationship between PS and task performance for three-member teams working on a computer-based simulation task while their electrodermal activity (EDA) was recorded.…”

“…Further studies are therefore required to determine the relationship between PS and task performance in three or more member teams, as an alternative to measuring a group’s PS using the collective representation of team member’s dyadic synchrony. [ 14 ]. Such studies might enable newer objective measures for evaluating team performance and help to design effective collaborative scenarios that facilitate team performance.…”

Transformation cost spectrum for irregularly sampled time series

“…The recurrence plot (RP) is a powerful tool for visualizing dynamical systems' recurrences in their phase space [22] and was used to quantify the behavior of dynamical systems in various fields, e.g., earth science [9,23], chemistry [24], economics [25], heart rate variability [26], traffic congestion [27], music studies [28], psychology [29]. This current study aims to detect critical transitions in prototypical dynamical systems and paleoclimate records by RP after preprocessing by TACTS.…”