PhD Defense - Victor Chung "Collective Emotion : Social and Cognitive Mechanisms

Date/time : Thursday, October 10, 3 p.m.

Location : Salle Favard, Ecole normale supérieure, 46 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris (or contact victor.chung@ens.psl.eu for a Zoom link)

Committee

• Guillaume Dezecache (IRD, Université Paris Saclay) - Reviewer
• Ivana Konvalinka (Technical University of Denmark) - Reviewer
• Brian Parkinson (University of Oxford) - Examiner
• Bernard Rimé (Université Catholique de Louvain) - Examiner
• Mikko Salmela (University of Copenhagen) - Examiner
• Julie Grèzes (Inserm, ENS, PSL) - Co-supervisor
• Elisabeth Pacherie (CNRS, ENS, PSL, EHESS) - Co-supervisor

Abstract

Speaking of the emotion of a crowd, a nation or a family is common. However, the idea that emotions can be collective seems contradictory to their standard scientific definition, which posits that an emotion is inextricably linked to the body and the subjective experience of an individual. Research in philosophy, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience has addressed this apparent contradiction by defining a collective emotion as a pattern of emotions that emerges when individuals interact and relate to each other in specific ways. Nonetheless, the current approaches to collective emotion remain insufficiently connected with each other and insufficiently informed by experimental research. This dissertation presents a programmatic framework that bridges theories of collective emotions with empirical research in the social and affective sciences. We outline the key characteristics of collective emotion, their hypothetical cognitive mechanisms, their possible functions, and promising methods for experimental research. Across two experiments, we apply this framework by recruiting dyads of unacquainted individuals, manipulating their emotions and social interactions, and measuring their subjective and physiological responses (cardiac, respiratory, and electrodermal activity, as well as facial electromyography). Altogether, our findings suggest that collective emotions are distinct from other affective phenomena and promote interpersonal bonding and coordination between strangers, even when emotions are not explicitly shared through communication