Publication details

Emotional contagion in a collective ritual

Authors

XYGALATAS Dimitrios LANG Martin MAŇO Peter KRÁTKÝ Jan FISCHER Ronald

Year of publication 2024
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.24111
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24111
Keywords emotional contagion, collective ritual, psychophysiology
Description Collective gatherings are often associated with the alignment of psychophysiological states between members of a crowd. While the process of emotional contagion has been studied extensively in dyads as well as at the population level, our understanding of its operation and dynamics as they unfold in real time in real-world group contexts remains limited. Employing a naturalistic design, we investigated emotional contagion in a public religious ritual by examining the relationship between interpersonal distance and autonomic arousal. We found that proximity in space was associated with heightened affective synchrony between participants in the context of the emotionally laden ritual (a Hindu procession) compared with an unstructured walk along the same route performed by the same group. Our findings contribute to the understanding of collective emotions and their underlying psychophysiological mechanisms, emphasizing the role of cultural practices in shaping collective emotional experiences.
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