| Description: |
Emotions are amplified when they take place in groups. This creates a unique challenge when onewishes to regulate groups’ emotions, especially if treating every person is infeasible. One response is totreat a fraction of a group, and then hope the treatment will spread to other group members. To testthe viability of this option, we designed an experiment to examine the impact of emotion regulationapplied to different proportions of groups of six Israeli participants (N = 2,659) who shared real-timeresponses to negative emotions-inducing political stimuli. Before interacting with each other, wetreated different proportions of each group with an emotion regulation intervention called cognitivereappraisal, 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, therewas a reduction in emotions both within the treated and non-treated participants. Furthermore,targeting above 40% of participants resulted in reliable group emotional change. Using semanticprojection analysis, we validated the contagion of reappraisal language. These findings shed light onthe conditions that enable collective emotion regulation. |