PSYC224-Week 10

What are group emotions?

• Emotions can be shared

• Individuals can feel emotions because other in their group have experience an emotion event

  • feeling shame because people from your race engaged in racist acts

• People influence our emotions in 2 ways

  • influence how we understand what we are feeling and the causes

  • expression and intensity of emotion impact by the presences or others (can amplify or dampen emotional expression)

• We need to consider

  • does group size matter

  • how can group emotions be measured

• However, we do know that there is high homogeneity in emotions

  • similar emotional state

What are the two types of group emotions

• Barsade & Gibson (1998)

• Top-down

• bottom-up

What are top-down emotions?

• Group emotion trickles down and impacts the emotional states of individual members

• From the top, we experience emotions

  • Emotional culture: the way culture deems how to express emotion is carried out by the individuals

• Affective dynamism: the pattern of change overtime in group affect owing to processes that lead collective affect to emerge and fluctuate

What are bottom-up emotions?

• group emotions are the sum of its part

• All the individual in how the are feeling lead to the overall feeling

• Building from the bottom up

• Affective convergence: affect that is shared, or held in common, by the members of a group

• Affective diversity: the configuration of affect across group members that is not shared, nor held in common, by members of a group

What are the 3 outcomes of group emotions

• Group attitudes

• Group interactions

• Group performance

  • creativity

  • decision making

How does group emotion impact group attitudes?

• Positive relationship between positive group affect and attitudes towards own group

  • higher group satisfaction, commitment and helping behaviour

  • decrease in withdrawal behaviour

  • higher group efficacy

• Group envy (negative emotion) can be detrimental - Duffy & Shaw, 2000)

How does group emotion impact group interactions?

• Knight & Eisenkraft (2014)

  • positive affect is positively associated with group social interactions and performance

• Barsade (2002)

  • Positive emotional contagion was positively related to multiple measures of intragroup cooperativeness and negatively related to intragroup conflict in a leaderless group negotiation task

How does group emotion impact group performance?

• Group performance is impacted by group affect indirectly and directly

• Impacts

  • Group creativity

  • Decision making

How does group emotion impact group creavtivity?

• Positive group affect increases cognitive flexibility, variety seeking behaviour and the creativity of group ideas (Isen 2000; Fredrickson, 1998; Gradwitch et al., 2003)

• Occasional studies showing negative group affect increases creativity as well (Tsai et al., 2012))

How does group emotion impact group decision making?

• There a mixed findings

• group effects mediates the effects of leadership, team behaviour on team performance

What are emotional contagion?

• Tendency to catch another person’s emotions - HATFIELD ET AL., 1992

• Important to catch another feelings emotions to help with perspective taking and empathy

  • Similar emotional responses strengthen social bonds (Anderson et al., 2003)

What is the evidence for emotion contagion?

• Barsade (2002)

  • Leaderless group, one member can infect the others and lead to a shared group mood

• Fowler & Christakis (2008)

  • happiness clusters - we see it in groups

  • happiness spreads across the group/social ties

What are the three ways emotional contagion happen?

• Automatic

• Intentional

How is emotional contagion a automatic process?

1. Learning: can develop through experince

2. Imitation: automatic imitations of others can activate similar emotional responses in ourselves

3. Co-attention: directing attention towards the same object or events as others

How is emotional contagion a intentional proccess?

1. Communicative information: deliberate mirroring another person’s emotional expression

   1. Bavelas et al (1986) hen an experimenter injured their finger, participants who could make eye contact with them were more likely to mimic their expression of pain than those who could not. Observers also judged these participants as showing greater understanding and concern

2. Social comparison: Using others’ emotional reactions to understand and evaluate their own feelings, particularly when a situation is ambiguous

3. Empathy: By taking others’ perspective, people interpret the situation in a similar way and experience a similar emotion

What impacts feeling emotion on behalf of your group?

• When people identify as members of a group, they can experience emotions for or from the standpoint of the group

  • Cialdini et al (1976) showed that American university students wear their university athletic apparel more frequently after a victory of their university team than after a loss.

  • Individuals also use the pronoun “we” to describe a team victory more frequently than when describing a loss. We also feel good or bad on the team’s behalf (Branscombe, Doosje, & McGarty, 2002; Hirt et al., 1992)

• The extent to which a person feels emotions on behalf of the group depends upon how much he/she identifies with the group

  • Belgian students from the University of Louvain-La-Neuve (Belgium) were asked to participate in a study comparing their opinions with those of another group on an (alleged) unfair decision of the board of directors of another Belgian university (University of Ghent). Two conditions: the group of Belgian students vs. two universities The emotional reactions (in particular, anger) were stronger when the students categorized themselves in the same group as those who experienced the unfair decision at their university, and these reactions were particularly marked for those individuals who strongly identified with the group (Yzerbyt et al., 2003).

What are group emotions towards other groups?

• People can experience emotions when events affect other ingroup members but not personally

  • Belgian and Dutch university students completed a questionnaire within weeks of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. (Dumont et al., 2003).

  • Participants were informed that the aim of the study was either to compare the emotional reactions of Europeans to Americans or the attitude of Arabs to Westerners toward the September 11 terrorist attacks.

  • Participants in the second (“Westerners”) condition reported more intense fear about the attacks and were more inclined to engage in fear-related behaviors (e.g., research of information on terrorist networks) than those in the second condition

• People can experience group emotions for events happened long before they were born

  • Similarly, although they had not been involved in any acts against Indigenous Australians themselves, Australian participants in one study reported feeling guilt on behalf of their country for such acts, which had been committed in the past (McGarty et al., 2005).

What are the three theories that explain group emotions between groups?

What is the intergroup emotion theory?

What is the sociofuntional model?

What is the BIAS map?

What are the three main group emotions?

Explain group empathy?

Explain group guilt

Explain group anger/prejudice