What is the crowd emotion amplification effect?

Let's look at how the crowd emotion amplification effect affects how we view each other.

When you speak in front of an audience, how do you know what the emotional state of the majority of the audience is?

This question has been studied in psychology and a curious phenomenon has been discovered that we will explain in detail in this article. We will learn about the effect of the amplification of the emotion of the crowd and what are its repercussions.

What is the crowd emotion amplification effect?

When a person addresses a crowd and tries to discern which is the predominant emotion among them all, a psychological phenomenon known as the crowd emotion amplification effect can occur. It basically consists of take as a reference the most visibly extreme emotions, since they are the ones that attract the receiver's attention most quicklyThe most extreme emotions, since they are the ones that attract the attention of the receiver more quickly, and extrapolate that information to all the members of the audience as a whole.

It should be borne in mind that these mental processes are automatic and take place in fractions of a second. Therefore, the observer has not had time to look at each and every one of the faces and therefore to interpret the emotional states of all of them, but has made a quick sweep through some of them, and his attention has been captured by the most prominent, i.e., those showing a more intense emotional expression, either in one direction or in another.

Therefore, the crowd's emotion amplification effect would act as a shortcut, a mechanism that would economize the mental flow in order to be able to to obtain a conclusion directly about the general emotionality of a group without having to carry out a deep analysis that would require a specific attention to each person and a comparison between all of them, which would be an enormously slower and more costly which would require specific attention to each individual and a comparison between all of them, which would be an enormously slower and more costly process at the processing level.

How does this mechanism work?

It is one thing to know what the crowd emotion amplification effect consists of, but it is quite another to understand how it works. Researchers have come up with different alternatives, and one of them has to do with a mental process called ensemble coding. The underlying process is that subjects make an immediate summary of all the visual information they perceive, including the emotionality of others.

Another possibility is the one we already anticipated in the previous point, which would consist of extrapolation of the general situation through the most salient information (the most marked emotions, in this case, since we are talking about this type of stimuli). (the most marked emotions, in this case, since we are talking about this type of stimuli). According to this theory, if we were in front of an audience in which several people were visibly angry while the rest maintained a neutral emotional state, we could infer that, in general, the whole group would be angry.

Obviously, this mechanism involves a biasand in this simple example it is clearly seen. The key is the following: the fact that a stimulus is the most striking does not mean that it is the predominant one in a set, but this does not seem to matter to our attention, since our perceptual processes will automatically focus on those elements that stand out from the rest only because of their apparent magnitude, not because they are the predominant tonic in the total set.

The importance of expressiveness

As the social beings that we are, we constantly carry out interactions between people, and in all of them the information we receive through facial expressions and non-verbal language is fundamental to attribute an emotional state to our interlocutor, which will continuously modulate the type of interaction that is taking place without us realizing it. It is such an automatic process that we are not aware of its existence, but it is vital to carry out the interaction.It is such an automatic process that we are not aware of its existence, but it is vital to carry out socially accepted interactions.

Possibly, the effect of amplifying the emotion of the crowd is a consequence of the importance of expressions, since it is to be expected that we will pay more attention to the faces of those we see in the crowd than to those we see in the crowd. we will presumably pay more attention to those faces that are expressing a more intense emotion.The fact is that we can automatically set off our alarms and adapt our method of interaction accordingly, either to calm the interlocutor or to share his or her joy, to give some examples of situations that could occur on a regular basis.

In this sense, it is also interesting to note that humans tend to focus more on negative emotional states, so within the range of intense expressions, those that denote negative or hostile emotionality are more likely to catch our attention than the rest, even if they are also intense but with a more positive orientation. In that case, between people showing joy and others showing anger, we will most likely direct our gaze towards the latter.

A study of the crowd's emotion amplification effect.

An interesting research has recently been carried out on the crowd emotion amplification effect by Goldenberg et al. in which they attempt to to observe this phenomenon under laboratory conditions and thus be able to study its true scope. We will now look at each part of this study in detail.

Hypothesis

In the previous phase of the experiment, three hypotheses were established which were to be tested in the following phases. The first of these is that the observed mean emotion estimate would be higher than it actually is. The second hypothesis would state that the crowd's emotion amplification effect would become increasingly stronger as more people were added to the observed audience.

Finally, the third hypothesis would refer to the fact that the effect studied would be significantly stronger in cases in which the most salient emotions were negative rather than positive. Once the three hypotheses were established, we proceeded to the experimental phase.

Experimental phase

Three consecutive studies were carried out to test the stated hypotheses.. In the first, 50 volunteers participated, each of whom observed on a screen a group of between 1 and 12 faces, some neutral and others with an expression of anger or happiness, for only one second, after which they had to indicate what emotion they perceived in general. This was repeated over 150 trials, in which the number and expression of the faces varied randomly to present a wide variety of situations.

The second experiment was the same as the first, with the difference that another variable was manipulated: exposure time.. Thus, participants viewed the groups of faces for 1 second, 1.4 seconds or 1.8 seconds, each condition being repeated for 50 trials, making (in a random order) a total of 150, as in the first experiment.

We came to the third and final experiment. The conditions were again similar to those of the first experiment, but this time the number of 12 faces was maintained in all trials, and another variable was studied: the eye movement of each individual, to check where the gaze was fixed in each of the trials.

Results

Once the three experiments were completed, all the data obtained were analyzed in order to reach conclusions that would allow us to verify or falsify the hypotheses. The first study made it possible to observe that, indeed, the participants observed a more intense emotionality in the faces than was generally the case. In addition, they also showed that, the greater the number of faces on the screen, the stronger this effect was, which corroborated the thesis of the second hypothesis..

The second test only reinforced these affirmations, since its results were also in line with the second and third hypotheses, since it was proven that negative emotions did indeed attract more attention from the participants than positive ones. However, the exposure time variable showed that this phenomenon was diluted with longer exposure times and therefore produced an amplification effect of the emotion of the crowd, which was weaker in negative emotions and longer exposure times.

The amplification effect observed in the third study was somewhat smaller than in the other two. It is possible that the addition of the eye-tracking devices could have altered the way participants naturally made their observations. It was observed that the difference between the mean perceived emotion on the faces and the actual emotion was greater the longer they stared at the more emotionally intense faces and less at the emotionally neutral ones. and less on those with neutral emotion.

The conclusion of this study, therefore, is that their three hypotheses were correct, and it opens the way to an interesting methodology with which to further study the crowd emotion amplification effect.

Bibliographical references:

• Goldenberg, A., Weisz, E., Sweeny, T., Cikara, M., Gross, J, (2020). The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect. Psychological Science.
• James, W. (1985). what is an emotion. Studies in psychology.
• Salguero, J.M., Fernández-Berrocal, P., Ruiz-Aranda, D., Castillo, R., Palomera, R. (2011). Emotional intelligence and psychosocial adjustment in adolescence: The role of emotional perception. European journal of Education and Psychology.