1 Department of Psychology, University of Denver.
2 Department of Psychology, Hamilton University.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Feb;28(2):193-203. doi: 10.1177/0956797616678188. Epub 2016 Dec 30.
Crowds of emotional faces are ubiquitous, so much so that the visual system utilizes a specialized mechanism known as ensemble coding to see them. In addition to being proximally close, members of emotional crowds, such as a laughing audience or an angry mob, often behave together. The manner in which crowd members behave-in sync or out of sync-may be critical for understanding their collective affect. Are ensemble mechanisms sensitive to these dynamic properties of groups? Here, observers estimated the average emotion of a crowd of dynamic faces. The members of some crowds changed their expressions synchronously, whereas individuals in other crowds acted asynchronously. Observers perceived the emotion of a synchronous group more precisely than the emotion of an asynchronous crowd or even a single dynamic face. These results demonstrate that ensemble representation is particularly sensitive to coordinated behavior, and they suggest that shared behavior is critical for understanding emotion in groups.
情绪面孔的群体随处可见，以至于视觉系统利用一种专门的机制，即集合编码来观察它们。除了彼此靠近之外，情绪群体的成员，如欢笑的观众或愤怒的暴徒，通常会一起行动。群体成员的行为方式——同步或不同步——对于理解他们的集体情感可能至关重要。集合机制是否对这些群体的动态特性敏感？在这里，观察者估计了一群动态面孔的平均情绪。一些群体的成员同步改变表情，而另一些群体的个体则异步行动。观察者对同步群体的情绪感知比异步群体甚至单个动态面孔的情绪感知更准确。这些结果表明，集合表示特别敏感于协调行为，并且它们表明共享行为对于理解群体中的情绪至关重要。
