Catching a smile from individuals and crowds: Evidence for distinct emotional contagion processes.

Research examining how crowd emotions impact observers usually requires participants to engage in an atypical mental process whereby (static) arrays of individuals are cognitively integrated to represent a crowd. The present work sought to extend our understanding of how crowd emotions may spread to individuals by assessing self-reported emotions, attention and muscle movement in response to emotions of dynamic, virtually modeled crowd stimuli. Self-reported emotions and attention from thirty-six participants were assessed when foreground and background crowd characters exhibited homogeneous (Study 1) or heterogeneous (Study 2) positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Results suggested that affective responses in observers are shaped by crowd emotions even in the absence of direct attention. Thirty-four participants supplied self-report and facial electromyography responses to the same homogeneous (Study 3) or heterogeneous (Study 4) crowd stimuli. Results indicated that positive crowd emotions appeared to exert greater attentional pull and objective responses, while negative crowd emotions also elicited affective responses. Study 5 (