What Makes Groups Emotional?

Abstract

When people experience emotions in a group, their emotions tend to have stronger intensity and to last longer. Why is that? This question has occupied thinkers throughout history, and with the use of digital media it is even more pressing today. Historically, attention has mainly focused on processes driven by the way emotions are shared between people via emotional interactions. Although interactions are a major driver of group emotionality, I review empirical findings that suggest that understanding group emotionality requires a broader view that integrates two additional processes: how emotions unfold within the social infrastructure in which they are shared and how these processes are affected by people’s cognition about emotions. I propose to summarize the literature using an infrastructure-cognition-interaction framework that contributes to a broader understanding of group emotionality, which should improve our ability to predict group emotionality and to change these emotions when they are undesired.

Putting the affect into affective polarisation

“…This biased transmission facilitates pairwise cooperation, while simultaneously increasing system-level polarisation. In another example, Goldenberg ( 2024 , p. 3) uses a complex systems approach to uncover the “processes that contribute to an increase in the duration and intensity of collective emotion”. In this model, interactions involve the influence of one person's emotions on others, cognition encompasses various processes of perceiving and evaluating others’ emotions, and infrastructure refers to spaces enabling emotional interactions and cognitions, primarily focusing on venues like interpersonal conversations, small group meetings, online gatherings, and social media discussions where political emotions are shared.…”

The Psychology of Collectives

“…Collectives can amplify or dampen individual emotions (Goldenberg, 2024), beliefs (Goldstone et al, 2024;Rabb et al, 2024;Vlasceanu et al, 2024;Warren et al, 2024), decision accuracy (Broomell & Davis-Stober, 2024;Martel et al, 2024), and cooperation tendencies (Fiedler et al, 2024).…”

“…Only one article specifically discusses collective emotions, an area in need of further research. Goldenberg (2024) proposes a framework to understand why groups tend to amplify individual emotions, emphasizing the interplay of the communication of emotions, individual cognitions about others' emotions, and the social infrastructure in which the emotions are shared.…”