CSH Talk by: Bernard Rimé, University of Louvain, Belgium
Location: Salon
For several decades, we have demonstrated that emotions systematically trigger a process of social sharing of emotion. People talk to their relatives about what happened to them. When an event hits a community or nation, the social sharing of emotion extends to the entire community. The social sharing of emotions, whether in person-to-person or in collective situations, fosters openness to others and social integration. We are currently investigating this process in light of the concept of emotional synchronization. I will present ongoing research on large databases in which we examine the relationships between emotional synchronization, social engagement, health, and collective well-being. To illustrate, one of these studies compares indicators of health and social well-being in cities with high levels of folk activity, compared to cities with low levels of folk activity matched with the former for the main socioeconomic variables.
Bio
Bernard Rimé is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) and active researcher at Psychological Science Research Institute of this University. He currently holds teaching appointments at the University of Lille (France). He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Amsterdam, Bari, Bologna, Geneva, Münster, San Sebastian, Quito, Massachussetts (Amherst, MA) and at the Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX). He is past president of ISRE (International Society for Research on Emotion) and of the Belgian Psychological Society. His research addresses the social psychology of emotion with a particular interest for the relations between emotions, social communication and social integration. He currently investigates individual and social effects of collective emotions in mass gatherings as well as emotions and collective memory in intergroup conflicts. He co-edited “Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior” (1991) with R. Feldman, “Collective memory of political events” (1997), with J. Pennebaker and D. Paez, and “Changing Emotions” (2013) with D. Hermans and B. Mesquita.