Collective Emotion & Social Affect

Primes about how emotion moves through individuals and groups: contagion and shared arousal (emotional contagion, collective effervescence), emotion-driven cognition and resistance (emotional reasoning, reactance), and social mechanisms that discharge or symbolize feeling (scapegoating, alienation, visual metaphor).

7 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Alienation — Disconnection from system.
• Collective Effervescence — Shared emotional energy.
• Emotional Contagion — Automatic spread of affect from person to person through a group.
• Emotional Reasoning — Decisions shaped by emotion.
• Metaphor (Visual/Artistic) — Symbolic imagery.
• Reactance — Resistance to constraints.
• Scapegoating — Channeling collective blame onto a substitute target.