Date: Friday 20th December
Time: 11 am
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Guillaume Dezecache (IJN)
Title: “Studies on emotional propagation
in humans: The cases of fear and joy”
Abstract: Crowd
psychologists of the 19th and 20th centuries have left us with the idea that
emotions are so contagious that they can cause large groups of individuals to
rapidly and spontaneously converge on an emotional level. Good illustrations of
this claim include situations of crowd panic where large movements of escape
are thought to emerge through local interactions, and without any centralized
coordination. Our studies sought to investigate the propagation of two
allegedly contagious emotions, i.e., fear and joy. I will present two
theoretical and two empirical studies that have investigated, at two different
levels of analysis, the phenomenon of emotional propagation of fear and joy:
firstly, at a proximal level of analysis (the how-question), I discuss the
potential mechanisms underlying the transmission of these emotions in crowds,
and the extent to which emotional transmission can be considered analogous to a
contagion process. Secondly, at an evolutionary/ultimate level of analysis (the
why-question), I ask why crowd members seem to be so inclined to share their
emotional experience of fear and joy with others. I present a study showing
that the transmission of fear might be facilitated by a tendency to modulate
one’s involuntary fearful facial reactions according to the informational
demands of conspecifics, suggesting that the biological function of spontaneous
fearful reactions might be communication of survival-value information to
others. Finally, I discuss the implications of these studies for the broader
understanding of emotional crowd behavior.
