Emotional sharing in football audiences

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Emotion Research
• Collective Behavior

Background:

• Current theories often conceptualize audiences as monolithic crowds.
• Leading emotion research paradigms oversimplify social-relational dynamics, reducing them to physiological (e.g., emotional contagion) or cognitive (e.g., social appraisal) processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify limitations in existing theories of audience and emotion.
• To propose an alternative conceptualization of emotional dynamics within audiences.
• To introduce the concept of emotional sharing and a dynamic, dispersed model of audiences.

Main Methods:

• Critical analysis of existing theoretical frameworks in audience studies and emotion research.
• Development of a new theoretical model for understanding audience emotional dynamics.
• Qualitative analysis of two case studies (scenes of jubilation) to illustrate the proposed concepts.

Main Results:

• Critique of the 'crowd' as a sufficient category for understanding audiences.
• Demonstration of how current emotion research paradigms limit the study of social-relational dynamics.
• Introduction of 'emotional sharing' as a key mechanism for social-relational emotional dynamics.
• Conceptualization of audiences as dynamic, dispersed social collectives.

Conclusions:

• Existing theories inadequately capture the complexity of audience emotions.
• The proposed framework of emotional sharing and dispersed collectives offers a more nuanced understanding.
• The study provides a new lens for analyzing collective emotional experiences in diverse settings.