The emotional expression of crowding
Searched over 200M research papers
Research Analysis by Consensus
Consensus Meter
The Emotional Expression of Crowding
Social Identification and Positive Emotion in Crowds
Crowding is often perceived as aversive, yet many people seek out crowded environments and enjoy them. Research indicates that the emotional response to crowding is significantly influenced by social identification with the crowd. In a study conducted at a crowded outdoor music event and a demonstration march, it was found that individuals who identified strongly with the crowd felt less crowded and experienced more positive emotions. This identification also moderated the relationship between feeling less crowded and positive emotions, suggesting that social identification can transform the experience of crowding from negative to positive.
Multidimensional Nature of Crowding Experiences
Crowding experiences are complex and involve an attribution process where individuals label and define their emotional states. A study using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering revealed that crowding experiences encompass various dimensions not fully captured by current theoretical models. This suggests the need for a more comprehensive taxonomy of crowding experiences to better understand the emotional responses elicited by different crowding scenarios.
Emotional Segregation and Social Category Learning
Crowd perception plays a crucial role in social category learning, particularly through emotional segregation. When crowds exhibit emotional segregation, such as distinct emotional subgroups based on race, it strengthens racial category boundaries and race essentialism. This effect is mediated by ensemble coding, a visual mechanism that summarizes perceptual information, indicating that emotional segregation in crowds can significantly influence social categorization processes.
Emotional Expression and Solidarity in Social Media Crowds
The emotional expression within social media crowds, such as those tweeting about National Football League games, can influence crowd solidarity. Emotional expressions like anger can encourage participation, while sadness can discourage it. Positive emotions and anxiety have more nuanced effects on participation, highlighting the dynamic relationship between emotional expression and crowd behavior in digital environments.
Acoustic Analysis of Crowd Emotions
Crowds express collective emotions through sounds, such as cheering or booing at events. Using deep learning techniques on sound spectrograms, researchers have been able to classify the emotional content of crowd sounds. This approach demonstrates that crowd emotions can be characterized by frequency-amplitude features, similar to individual voices, providing a novel method for analyzing collective emotional expressions.
Impact of Crowding on Customer Emotions in Virtual Environments
In a study using virtual reality to simulate a crowded restaurant waiting area, it was found that crowding significantly affects customer emotions, including arousal and discomfort. These emotional responses, in turn, influence approach-avoidance behaviors. The study also highlighted the moderating role of desired privacy, suggesting that individuals' privacy preferences can alter their emotional and behavioral responses to crowding.
Emotional Responses to Urban Crowding
High-density urban environments can lead to the invasion of personal space, evoking negative emotions such as stress and aggression. A study using wearable devices to measure emotional responses in a crowded urban area found significant effects of personal space invasions on emotional states. This underscores the importance of considering personal space and crowd density in urban planning to mitigate negative emotional responses.
Anger Superiority Effect in Crowded Visual Tasks
The "anger superiority effect" refers to the phenomenon where threatening faces are detected more efficiently in a crowd than non-threatening faces. Studies have shown that this effect is robust across different cultural contexts and persists even when the target face is surrounded by other emotional faces. This suggests that the detection of anger in crowds is a naturalistic phenomenon with significant implications for understanding emotional processing in crowded environments .
Influence of Crowded Facial Expressions on Preferences
Crowded facial expressions can bias evaluative judgments, even when the emotional information is not consciously accessible. Using a novel gaze-contingent crowding method, researchers found that crowded emotional expressions influenced preferences for neutral pictographs. This indicates that emotional information in crowded settings can affect decision-making processes, highlighting the subtle yet powerful impact of crowding on preferences.
Conclusion
The emotional expression of crowding is a multifaceted phenomenon influenced by social identification, emotional segregation, and the nature of the crowding experience. Understanding these dynamics can provide valuable insights into how crowding affects emotions and behaviors, both in physical and digital environments. Further research is needed to develop comprehensive models that capture the complexity of crowding experiences and their emotional impacts.
Sources and full results
Most relevant research papers on this topic
Crowdedness Mediates the Effect of Social Identification on Positive Emotion in a Crowd: A Survey of Two Crowd Events
The Experience of Crowding
Rapid Visual Perception of Interracial Crowds: Racial Category Learning From Emotional Segregation
The emotional antecedents of solidarity in social media crowds
Emotional sounds of crowds: spectrogram-based analysis using deep learning
Desired privacy and the impact of crowding on customer emotions and approach-avoidance responses: waiting in a virtual reality restaurant.
Crowding density in urban environment and its effects on emotional responding of pedestrians: Using wearable device technology with sensors capturing proximity and psychophysiological emotion responses while walking in the street
The anger superiority effect revisited: a visual crowding task
The face in the crowd effect: anger superiority when using real faces and multiple identities.
Preference Is Biased by Crowded Facial Expressions
Try another search
probiotics in kefir for gut health
Maximum bite force in reduced periodontal support
lucid dreams
The impact of digital currencies on global financial systems and economic policy.
The ethics and implications of facial recognition technology in public security and privacy.
The impact of digital literacy on critical thinking and information evaluation.