A timely exploration into a topic somewhat neglected in recent year, filling a gap in the affective sciences literature

Provides an interdisciplinary account of the topic, providing information of interest to those across psychology, philosophy, and sociology

Considers collective emotions both in the physical and the virtual world

Although collective emotions have a long tradition in scientific inquiry, for instance in mass psychology and the sociology of rituals and social movements, their importance for individuals and the social world has never been more obvious than in the past decades. The Arab Spring revolution, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and mass gatherings at music festivals or mega sports events clearly show the impact collective emotions have both in terms of driving conflict and in uniting people. But these examples only show the most obvious and evident forms of collective emotions. Others are more subtle, although less important: shared moods, emotional atmospheres, and intergroup emotions are part and parcel of our social life. Although these phenomena go hand in hand with any formation of sociality, they are little understood. Moreover, there still is a large gap in our understanding of individual emotions on the one hand and collective emotional phenomena on the other hand.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of contemporary theories and research on collective emotions. It spans several disciplines and brings together, for the first time, various strands of inquiry and up-to-date research in the study of collective emotions and related phenomena. In focusing on conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in collective emotion research, the volume narrows the gap between the wealth of studies on individual emotions and inquiries into collective emotions. The book catches up with a renewed interest into the collective dimensions of emotions and their close relatives, for example emotional climates, atmospheres, communities, and intergroup emotions. This interest is propelled by a more general increase in research on the social and interpersonal aspects of emotion on the one hand, and by trends in philosophy and cognitive science towards refined conceptual analyses of collective entities and the collective properties of cognition on the other hand. The book includes sections on: Conceptual Perspectives; Collective Emotion in Face-to-Face Interactions; The Social-Relational Dimension of Collective Emotion; The Social Consequences of Collective Emotions; Group-Based and Intergroup Emotion; Rituals, Movements, and Social Organization; and Collective Emotions in Online Social Systems.

Including contributions from psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and neuroscience, this volume is a unique and valuable contribution to the affective sciences literature.

Readership: Students and researchers in the affective sciences - psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology

Edited by Christian von Scheve, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and Mikko Salmela, Academy Research Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland

Christian von Scheve is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, where he heads the Research Area Sociology of Emotion at the Institute of Sociology. He is also affiliated to the Research Cluster "Languages of Emotion" at Freie Universität and appointed Research Professor at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vienna and a Fellow of the Research Group "Emotions as Bio-Cultural Processes" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. He studied Sociology, Psychology, Economics, and Political Science at the University of Hamburg, where he obtained his doctorate in Economics and Social Sciences. He works in the sociology of culture and stratification as well as in economic sociology and social psychology and focuses on the manifold intersections of culture, society, and emotion.

Mikko Salmela is an Academy Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and a member of Finnish Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences. He worked as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001-2002 and at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in 2006-2007. Salmela studied Philosophy and Political History at the University of Helsinki where he obtained his doctorate in Social Sciences. His postdoctoral and subsequent research has focused on the philosophy of emotions from an interdisciplinarily informed perspective. In particular, he addresses questions about the nature and justification of emotions, both individual and collective; about the relation of emotions, values, and identity; and about the roles of collective affective phenomena in the structure and dynamics of social groups.

Contributors:

Nyla R. Branscombe, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KA, USA

Tobias Brosch, Department of Psychology and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Dr Martin Bruder, University of Konstanz , Zukunftskolleg, Martin Bruder, Department of Psychology/Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Germany

Randall Collins, Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Joseph de Rivera, Department of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA

Mark A. Ferguson, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, WI, USA

Agneta Fischer, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Megan Forbes, University of Hawaii Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

Antonios Garas, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

David Garcia, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Margaret Gilbert, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Eran Halperin, The New School of Psychology

Elaine Hatfield, University of Hawaii Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

Bennett W. Helm, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA

Regine Herbrik, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Stephanie Houde, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada

Nicole E. Iannone, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

James M. Jasper, Department of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Arvid Kappas, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany

Janice R. Kelly, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Funda Kivran-Swaine, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Hubert Knoblauch, Department of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

J. David Knottnerus, Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

Joel Krueger, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Claus Lamm, Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria

Edward J. Lawler, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Diane M. Mackie, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Antony S. R. Manstead, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK

Megan K. McCarty, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Mor Naaman, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Dario Paez, University of the Basque Country, Spain

Brian Parkinson, University of Oxford, UK

John Protevi, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Stefan Rank, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna, Austria

Richard L. Rapson, University of Hawaii Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

Devin G. Ray, University of Aberdeen, UK

Bernard Rimé, Université de Louvain, Belgium

Mikko Salmela, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland

Hans Bernhard Schmid, University of Vienna, Austria

Frank Schweitzer, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Giorgia Silani, Collective Emotions and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS), Trieste, Italy

Marcin Skowron, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna, Austria

Jan Slaby, Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Eliot R. Smith, University of Indiana Bloomington, IN, USA

Gavin Brent Sullivan, School of Social, Psychological and Communication Sciences, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

Mike Thelwall, Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, UK

Shane R. Thye, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Ilmo van der Löwe, University of Oxford, UK

Christian von Scheve, Department of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Jeongkoo Yoon, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea