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4 - Mass Emotional Events: Rethinking Emotional Contagions after COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2022

Jordan McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Wollongong, Australia
Roger Patulny
Affiliation:
University of Wollongong, Australia
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Summary

Introduction

Recent work on theories of collective emotions has recognized emotions as phenomena that spread between individuals and groups to form collective emotional moods, landscapes and climates (Bar-Tal et al, 2007; Von Scheve and Salmela, 2014). Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused sudden and dramatic shifts in social interaction that warrants a reimagining of emotional contagions. The collective hopes and anxieties of those living through the pandemic indicate the development of a ‘new normal’ that highlights the need to reconsider existing theories. In particular, the rapid change in collective emotions, spreading in an almost ‘viral’ manner, warrants that we pay new attention to these concepts. The idea that emotions are created and shared collectively is not new. The spread of feelings to create common, collective emotional experiences and cultures is captured in existing theories of emotional contagion (Von Scheve and Ismer, 2013). Emerging from early theories about crowd behaviour from Gustave Le Bon (1895), they suggest that emotions spread physically at the micro-social level through a process of mimicking and synchronizing expressions, vocalization, postures and movements, creating a feedback loop that homogenizes into a recognizable emotion shared by a group of people (Hatfield et al, 1994). More recent studies have found this micro-level phenomenon can occur online, between individuals interacting through bounded digital social media networks (Underwood and Olson, 2019).

However, recent events demonstrate the power of macro-events to influence and spread emotions widely across whole societies and nations. COVID-19 has resulted in new attention, focus and emotional valence being given to rolling government press releases and the 24-hour news cycle, amplified and hastened by social media. In this new emotional landscape, singular examples of emotional contagions (for example panic buying and grocery shortages, and anxiety manifest from self-isolation regulations, travel-bans, and school closures) are experienced by millions of people simultaneously. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter rethinks the ways that emotional contagions develop and function on a mass scale. We use the term ‘mass emotional event’ to describe how the impacts of emotional contagion accumulate across the micro, meso and macro levels of society, and take particular forms at the national and international levels. The chapter will evaluate existing theories of emotional landscapes and emotional contagions before setting out a reimagined approach in the concept of mass emotional events.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dystopian Emotions
Emotional Landscapes and Dark Futures
, pp. 71 - 88
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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