Understanding the Role of Emotions in Group Dynamics in Emergency Situations

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.