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We examined social facilitation and emotional convergence in amusement, sadness, and fear in dynamic interactions. Dyads of friends or strangers jointly watched emotion-eliciting films while they either could or could not communicate nonverbally. We assessed three components of each emotion (expressions, appraisals, and feelings), as well as attention to and social motives toward the co-participant. In Study 1, participants interacted through a mute videoconference. In Study 2, they sat next to each other and either were or were not separated by a partition. Results revealed that facilitation and convergence are not uniform across different emotions and emotion components. Particularly strong supporting patterns emerged for the facilitation of and convergence in smiling. When direct interaction was possible (Study 2), friends showed a general tendency for strong convergence, with the exception of fear-related appraisals. This suggests that underlying processes of emotional contagion and social appraisal are differentially relevant for different emotions.

This article presents a computational framework for understanding how media information about environmental problems influences cognition, emotion, and behaviour. The theoretical assumptions are formally specified and implemented in the computer model ITERA (Intuitive Thinking in Environmental Risk Appraisal) using a constraint satisfaction network.The model makes predictions about the cognitive evaluation of environmental problems, about the development of distinct emotions (anger and sadness), and about the resulting action tendencies. In addition, the model describes how cognitions and emotions interact in making judgements entailing coherence biases. In three experiments (N = 258), we presented manipulated media reports about environmental damages. The effects of three variables (knowledge about the riskiness of an action; higher goal of the actor; voluntariness of the actor) were compared with the model's predictions. The empirical data confirmed the predicted coherence effects for the cognitive appraisal. Likewise, the model's predictions for anger corresponded well with the empirical results. Assumptions concerning sadness, however, were only partially confirmed.Cognitive psychology and cognitive science so far have largely neglected the important role of emotion in human judgement and decision making. For example, state of the art psychological reviews and books about thinking, two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We thank Paul Thagard for providing the source code of IMP on which the implementation of ITERA is based upon.

This article interprets emotional change as a transition in a complex dynamical system. We argue that the appropriate kind of dynamical system is one that extends recent work on how neural networks can perform parallel constraint satisfaction. Parallel processes that integrate both cognitive and affective constraints can give rise to states that we call emotional gestalts, and transitions can be understood as emotional gestalt shifts. We describe computational models that simulate such phenomena in ways that show how dynamical and gestalt metaphors can be given a concrete realization.

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