What is the crowd emotion amplification effect?

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

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

• Related article: "What is social psychology?"

What is the crowd emotion amplification effect?

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

It must 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 pay attention to each and every one of the faces and therefore to interpret the emotional states of all of them, but rather has made a quick sweep through some of them, and your attention has been caught by the most prominent ones, that is to say, those that showed a more intense emotional expression, either in one direction or in other.

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

How does this mechanism work?

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

Another possibility is the one that we already anticipated in the previous point, and would consist of the 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). According to this theory, if we were in front of an audience in which several of the people were visibly angry while the rest maintained a neutral emotional state, we could infer that, in general, the group would be angry.

Obviously, this mechanism implies a bias, and in that simple example it is clearly appreciated. 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 that does not seem to matter to our attention, since our processes perceptives will automatically focus on those elements that stand out from the rest only because of their apparent magnitude, not because they are the predominant tone in the set total.

The importance of expressiveness

As social beings that we are, we constantly interact with each other, and in all of them the information we receive through facial expressions is fundamental. and non-verbal language 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 unaware 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 derived from the importance of the expressions, since it is supposed that we will pay more attention to those faces that are showing a more intense emotion, so that it automatically triggers our alarms and we can adapt our method of interaction accordingly, since either to calm the interlocutor or to share her joy, to give some examples of situations that could occur habitually.

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

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A study of the amplification effect of crowd emotion

An interesting piece of research has recently been carried out on the effect of amplifying the emotion of the crowd by Goldenberg et al., in which it deals with observe this phenomenon under laboratory conditions and thus be able to study its true scope. Next we will see in detail each part of this study.

Hypothesis

In the previous phase of the experiment, three hypotheses were established that would later be verified in the following phases. The first of these is that the estimate of the observed mean emotion would be higher than it actually is. The second hypothesis would state that the crowd emotion amplification effect would become increasingly intense 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 more powerful in cases in which the most prominent emotions were of a negative nature instead of positive. Once the three hypotheses were confirmed, the experimental phase proceeded.

experimental phase

Three consecutive studies were carried out to verify the hypotheses stated. The first involved 50 volunteers, each of whom observed a group of between 1 and 12 faces on a screen, some of them neutral. and others with an angry or happy expression, for just one second, after which they had to indicate what emotion they perceived in general. It was repeated over 150 trials, in which the number and expression of the faces varied randomly to present the most diverse situations.

The second experiment was the same as the first, with the difference that another variable was manipulated: the exposure time. In this way, the participants saw the groups of faces for 1 second, 1.4 seconds or 1.8 seconds, repeating each condition for 50 trials, so they would make up (in a random order) a total of 150, the same as in the first experiment.

We come to the third and final experiment. The conditions were again similar to those of the first, 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 they fixed their gaze in each of the essays.

Results

Once the three experiments were completed, all the data obtained were analyzed in order to reach conclusions that would allow the hypotheses to be verified or falsified. The first study made it possible to observe that, indeed, the participants observed a more intense emotionality in the faces than it generally was. 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 did nothing but strengthen these statements, since its results were also in line with what was proposed by the second hypothesis and also of the third, since it was verified that the negative emotions, indeed, captured more attention of the participants than the positive ones. However, the exposure time variable showed that this phenomenon was diluted with longer times and therefore therefore produced an emotion-amplifying effect of the weaker crowd in negative emotions and time long.

The amplification effect observed in the third study was somewhat less than in the other two. It is possible that adding the eye-tracking devices could have altered the way the participants naturally made their observations. It was observed that the difference between the average perceived emotion in the faces and the real one was greater the longer they stared at the faces with more intense emotions and less in those who presented a neutral emotion.

The conclusion of this study, therefore, is that all three of its hypotheses were correct, and opens the way to a interesting methodology with which to continue studying the amplification effect of the emotion of the crew.

Bibliographic 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? Psychology studies.
• 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.