Abstract
In social psychology, emotional contagion describes the widely observed phenomenon of one person’s emotions being influenced by surrounding people’s emotions. While the overall effect is agreed upon, the underlying mechanism of the spread of emotions has seen little quantification and application to computational agents despite extensive evidence of its impacts in everyday life. In this paper, we examine computational models of emotional contagion by implementing two models (Bosse et al., European council on modeling and simulation, pp. 212–218, 2009) and Durupinar, From audiences to mobs: Crowd simulation with psychological factors, PhD dissertation, Bilkent University, 2010) that draw from two separate lines of contagion research: thermodynamics-based and epidemiological-based. We first perform sensitivity tests on each model in an evacuation simulation, ESCAPES, showing both models to be reasonably robust to parameter variations with certain exceptions. We then compare their ability to reproduce a real crowd panic scene in simulation, showing that the thermodynamics-style model (Bosse et al., European council on modeling and simulation, pp. 212–218, 2009) produces superior results due to the ill-suited contagion mechanism at the core of epidemiological models. We also identify that a graduated effect of fear and proximity-based contagion effects are key to producing the superior results. We then reproduce the methodology on a second video, showing that the same results hold, implying generality of the conclusions reached in the first scene.
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Notes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsoDwM_KKfo, posted May 5, 2010.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the VU University group that we have cited extensively in this work for sharing their experience and resources pertaining to the video evaluation. This research was sponsored in part by the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM) Simulation Training and Technology Center (STTC). The content or information presented does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. This research was also supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security through the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) under award number 2008-ST-104-000013. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Department of Homeland Security, or the University of Southern California, or CREATE.
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Tsai, J., Bowring, E., Marsella, S. et al. Empirical evaluation of computational fear contagion models in crowd dispersions. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 27, 200–217 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-013-9220-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-013-9220-6