Is this my group or not? The role of ensemble coding of emotional expressions in group categorization.

Abstract

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.

The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect

“…If bias in attention drives amplification among individuals with social anxiety, training these individuals to focus their attention on less expressive members of the crowd may be useful in reducing their social anxiety (e.g., Bauer, 2009). In conclusion, this project extends recent attempts to examine the role of ensemble coding in processes that are important to social functioning (Goldenberg et al, 2020;Lamer et al, 2018;Phillips et al, 2018). Learning more about how people rapidly evaluate complex social information not only may explain important aspects of social behavior but also may open the door to future interventions.…”

The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect

“…If bias in attention drives amplification among individuals with social anxiety, training these individuals to focus their attention on less expressive members of the crowd may be useful in reducing their social anxiety (see for example Bauer, 2009). To conclude, this project extends recent attempts to examine the role of ensemble coding in processes that are important to social functioning (Goldenberg et al, 2019;Lamer, Sweeny, Dyer, & Weisbuch, 2018;Phillips, Slepian, & Hughes, 2018). Learning more about how people rapidly evaluate complex social information may not only explain important aspects of social behavior, but may also open the door to future interventions.…”

Comparing person and people perception: Multiple group members do not increase stereotype priming

“…Established initially for low-level features of objects (e.g., size, brightness, orientation, speed, location; Alvarez & Oliva, 2008 ; Ariely, 2001 ; Bauer, 2009 ; Parkes et al, 2001 ; Watamaniuk & Duchon, 1992 ), ensemble coding has been shown to extend to higher-order person-related percepts, including judgements of emotion, identity, and sex (Alt et al, 2017; De Fockert & Wolfenstein, 2009 ; Goldenberg et al, 2020 ; Goodale et al, 2018 ; Haberman & Whitney, 2007 ; Yang & Dunham, 2019 ). For example, with regard to group membership, people can readily estimate the sex-based composition of briefly presented facial arrays ( Yang & Dunham, 2019 ).…”