Pinus Michael, Cao Yajun, Halperin Eran, Coman Alin, Gross James J, Goldenberg Amit
Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA.
Harvard University, Digital, Data and Design Institute, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Feb 6;16(1):1387. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-56538-x.
When emotions occur in groups, they sometimes impact group behavior in undesired ways. Reducing group's emotions with emotion regulation interventions can be helpful, but may also be a challenge, because treating every person in the group is often infeasible. One solution is to treat a fraction of a group, and then hope the effect of the treatment will spread to other group members. To test the viability of this option, we designed an experiment to examine the impact of emotion regulation applied to different proportions of groups of six Israeli participants (N = 2659) who shared real-time responses to negative emotions-inducing political stimuli. Before interacting with each other, we treated different proportions of each group with an emotion regulation intervention called cognitive reappraisal, which involved teaching participants to reinterpret events to reduce negative emotions. The results showed that as the proportion of participants who received the treatment increased, there was a reduction in emotions within the non-treated participants. Furthermore, targeting above 40% of participants resulted in reliable group emotional change. Using semantic projection analysis, we validated the contagion of reappraisal language. These findings shed light on the conditions that enable collective emotion regulation.
当情绪在群体中出现时，它们有时会以不良方式影响群体行为。通过情绪调节干预来减少群体的情绪可能会有所帮助，但也可能是一项挑战，因为对群体中的每个人进行治疗往往不可行。一种解决方案是治疗群体中的一部分人，然后希望治疗效果能传播到其他群体成员身上。为了测试这种选择的可行性，我们设计了一项实验，以检验对六名以色列参与者组成的不同比例群体（N = 2659）应用情绪调节的影响，这些参与者对引发负面情绪的政治刺激分享实时反应。在相互交流之前，我们用一种名为认知重评的情绪调节干预对每个群体的不同比例成员进行治疗，这包括教导参与者重新诠释事件以减少负面情绪。结果表明，随着接受治疗的参与者比例增加，未接受治疗的参与者的情绪有所减少。此外，针对40%以上的参与者进行治疗会导致可靠的群体情绪变化。通过语义投射分析，我们验证了重评语言的感染力。这些发现揭示了实现集体情绪调节的条件。
