Christian von Scheve and Sven Ismer (2013), Emotion Review 5(4):406–413 — DOI-10.1177/1754073913484170
Key takeaways
- Collective emotion is convergence, not a group’s state. The authors define it as synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards one event or object. The minimal case needs no awareness of one another: drivers in one traffic jam, with the same goal and the same beliefs, are angry together.
- Two processes amplify the baseline and change its quality. One is mutual awareness, through contagion in co-presence or through mediated sharing. The other is membership in a collective, through shared appraisals, social identity, collective intentions, norms, collective memory and group-based sentiments.
- I-mode and We-mode. Shared private concerns give I-mode collective emotion. Appraisals grounded in collectively intentional states, held as a member, give We-mode collective emotion, which the authors expect to differ in quality. Contagion in a crowd can create the identity that makes the We-mode possible. They offer this as a hypothesis, illustrated by protests.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, with four works on emotion in groups and organisations, to connect the record’s emotion holdings to its social-ontology holdings. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.
In this batch it is the theoretical frame the other works fit into.
- Barsade (LIT-706) is a causal test of the face-to-face mechanism. She manipulated a confederate’s mood in work groups and measured contagion and its effect on cooperation and conflict. Barsade’s Study 2 measures group contagion as convergence, the ICC of members’ mood rising from .00 to .24. That is this paper’s definition, operationalised a decade earlier. The two are compatible, not rival. This paper treats contagion as one mechanism among several, and Barsade tests only that one. This paper does not cite it. It cites Barsade & Gibson (1998) and Kelly & Barsade (2001) instead.
- Sanchez-Burks & Huy (LIT-699), unread, by their abstract, give the perceiver’s side. Emotional aperture is the ability to recognise the composition of diverse emotions in a collective. That presupposes what this paper’s definition allows: a collective’s emotion can be a distribution, partly converged, rather than one shared state.
On the record’s emotion theories. The paper presupposes appraisal-caused emotion, extended socially (Lazarus & Smith 1988, Parkinson, Manstead & Fischer). That is the tradition of Lazarus (LIT-550) and of Frijda (LIT-540). Frijda’s 1994 account of sentiments as appraisal dispositions is what the paper uses for group-based sentiments. Barrett (LIT-542) denies that appraisals cause emotions. On her view convergence would come from shared emotion concepts. That lies closer to this paper’s “culture and shared knowledge” strand, and the paper does not consider it.
On social ontology. The paper uses the collective-intentionality literature to separate aggregate from non-aggregate collective intention, citing Gilbert’s “Walking Together” (LIT-477), Bratman’s “Shared Intention” (1993; the record holds his 1992 “Shared Cooperative Activity”, LIT-471), Tuomela and Tomasello. It builds bottom-up “in the tradition of methodological individualism” by choice, and does not argue that groups cannot be subjects of emotion. It cites Huebner’s “Genuinely collective emotions” (LIT-702), which argues they can, as one of the accounts relating collective intention to collective emotion, and does not answer it. The two are not declared rivals: the convergence definition does not exclude a genuinely collective emotion held by a group. It leaves such states outside its scope as a matter of method, and the We-mode collective emotion is where the two would meet. Huebner’s later book (LIT-426) is the record’s other holding. No relation is declared to any of these. The paper uses them and does not extend, test or answer any of them.