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Understanding the Role of Emotions in Group Dynamics in Emergency Situations

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Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XV

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TCCI,volume 8670))

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Abstract

Decision making under stressful circumstances, e.g., during evacuation, often involves strong emotions and emotional contagion from others. In this paper the role of emotions in social decision making in large technically assisted crowds is investigated. For this a formal, computational model is proposed, which integrates existing neurological and cognitive theories of affective decision making. Based on this model several variants of a large scale crowd evacuation scenario were simulated. By analysis of the simulation results it was established that (1) human agents supported by personal assistant devices are recognised as leaders in groups emerging in evacuation; (2) spread of emotions in a crowd increases the resistance of agent groups to opinion changes; (3) spread of emotions in a group increases its cohesiveness; (4) emotional influences in and between groups are, however, attenuated by personal assistant devices, when their number is large.

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Acknowledgement

One of the authors was supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, which is the applied science division of NWO, and the Technology Program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Kluyverweg 1, 2629 HS, Delft, The Netherlands

    Alexei Sharpanskykh

  2. COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Kashif Zia

Authors
  1. Alexei Sharpanskykh
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  2. Kashif Zia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexei Sharpanskykh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland

    Ngoc Thanh Nguyen

  2. School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    Ryszard Kowalczyk

  3. Departamento de Infomática y Automática, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Juan Manuel Corchado

  4. Departamento de Inteligenca Artificial, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Javier Bajo

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Sharpanskykh, A., Zia, K. (2014). Understanding the Role of Emotions in Group Dynamics in Emergency Situations. In: Nguyen, N., Kowalczyk, R., Corchado, J., Bajo, J. (eds) Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8670. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44750-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44750-5_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44749-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44750-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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