Collective Emotions

Abstract

When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together—whether the emotions are positive or negative and whether the situations are online or offline—we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which people experience emotions together, there appear to be emergent macrolevel affective processes that cannot be readily captured at the individual level. In this article, we examine these macrolevel affective phenomena, which are termed collective emotions. We open with a general review of research on collective psychological processes. We then define collective emotions and discuss their key features. Next, we focus our attention on the emergent properties of collective emotions and map them using three dimensions: quality, magnitude, and time course. Finally, we discuss pressing open questions and future directions for research on collective emotions.

Strategic Regulation of Empathy

“…Experience sharing also facilitates group efforts which require coordinated action toward specific goals that would be difficult or impossible for individuals to achieve on their own. For instance, people who share in others' outrage are more likely to engage in collective action [109][110][111].…”

An Agent-Based Model of Opinion Polarization Driven by Emotions

“…Collective emotions are defined as emotional states shared by large amounts of people at the same time [20]. Research on collective emotions, while learning from established works from social psychology and sociology, is still a growing field [21,22]. e hyperlens model of social regulation of emotion is an adaptation of previous models of social factors of emotions to capture collective aspects of emotional life [23].…”

The Effects of the 2016 Copa América Centenario Victory on Social Trust, Self-Transcendent Aspirations and Evaluated Subjective Well-Being: The Role of Identity With the National Team and Collective Pride in Major Sport Events

“…H3–H6 aimed to specifically test to what extent the identity that fans experience with the national team in this type of sporting event can prospectively explain the social effects and the effects on well-being after the final. In line with what some authors suggest, we also aimed to investigate the bottom-up effect that collective emotions such as pride have when they are experienced in a ritual ( Von Scheve and Salmela, 2014 ; Goldenberg et al, 2020 ); and in this specific case, as a result of the victory obtained by Chile.…”

“…It seems that collective emotions can have important repercussions on a collective level (referring to group behavior, beliefs, etc.) but also a bottom-up effect on different individual cognitive variables ( Von Scheve and Ismer, 2013 ; Goldenberg et al, 2020 ).…”

“…This gives rise to the experience of collective emotions that allude to the collective as the entity that experiences emotion, so these transcend the individual ( Goldenberg et al, 2014 ; Sullivan, 2018 ). Specifically, collective emotions are considered a macro-level phenomenon as a product of the emotional dynamics generated among people who are living or experiencing the same situation ( Goldenberg et al, 2020 ). In this sense, different investigations have studied the role that collective pride has in major sport events such as the soccer World Cup 2010 in South Africa ( Møller, 2014 ; Sullivan, 2018 ) or the soccer World Cup 2014 in Brazil ( Sullivan, 2014b ).…”