Collective emotion and ritual

Emotion that happens between people

Most of the theories in this section treat emotion as something that happens inside an individual and is then expressed, shared or regulated. Many of the moments people describe as cathartic, however, are collective. A stadium sings together after a loss; a crowd at a vigil falls silent; strangers at a concert cry at the same chord; mourners at a funeral move from grief to shared laughter. People often say these experiences change them, and that the change could not have happened alone.

This essay asks what theories of collective emotion and ritual propose about such moments, what research has measured, and how the answers bear on the site’s distinction between relief and resolution. The empirical side of synchrony is covered in the Research note on collective synchrony; this essay concentrates on the theories behind it.

Durkheim: ritual and the renewal of the group

The sociological theory of collective emotion begins with Émile Durkheim’s study of religious life, published in 1912 (Durkheim, 1912). Working from ethnographic reports, Durkheim argued that religious ritual is fundamentally social. When a group gathers and performs shared actions around shared symbols, participants experience an intensified emotion that exceeds what any of them would feel alone. They experience this force as coming from something greater than themselves. Durkheim’s interpretation was that what they encounter is, in effect, the group: ritual makes the collective present and felt. Participants leave with renewed attachment to the group and its moral order.

Two features of this theory matter here. First, it is explicitly about emotion produced between people, by co-presence and shared action, not about individual emotions that are released in company. Second, its function is integrative: ritual is said to renew solidarity, not to resolve individual problems.

Durkheim’s theory has been criticised for its functionalism, its reliance on dated and secondhand ethnography, and its tendency to present social cohesion as the purpose of ritual. It makes no measured claim. The site cites it for its historical influence and for predictions that later research has tested, which Páez and colleagues summarise as the prediction that collective gatherings, through the social sharing of emotion they generate, bring participants to a state of collective effervescence: a sense of union with others and a feeling of empowerment accompanied by positive affect, with renewed confidence in life and social institutions (Páez, Rimé, Basabe, Wlodarczyk, & Zumeta, 2015).

Collins: interaction ritual chains

Randall Collins extended Durkheim’s account from dramatic religious ceremonies to everyday encounters (Collins, 2004). In his theory, which he describes as a radical microsociology, rituals are not only formal events but any interaction with the right ingredients. In the standard summary of the model, these ingredients are bodily co-presence, a boundary between participants and outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood. When they come together and intensify through feedback, the ritual succeeds.

Successful rituals, Collins proposes, create symbols of group membership and charge individuals with emotional energy: a sense of confidence, enthusiasm and initiative. Failed rituals drain emotional energy. People move from situation to situation over the course of their lives, drawn towards interactions where their cultural resources give them the best emotional energy payoff. The theory thus links micro-level emotional experiences to larger patterns of social life; Collins applies it to phenomena as different as conversation, smoking and social stratification (interaction ritual chain).

For catharsis, Collins’s theory offers an alternative to the hydraulic model. The emotional high after a successful gathering is not the release of stored feeling; it is emotional energy produced by the interaction. And because people seek interactions that produce it, the theory predicts that they will return to rituals that work for them, whether or not those rituals change anything else. The book is a theoretical framework built on microsociological observation, not a quantitative test.

Rimé: sharing and emotional climate

Bernard Rimé’s work on social sharing (Theory 05) provides a psychological bridge between individual and collective emotion (Rimé, 2007). Sharing reactivates emotion in speaker and listener and favours empathy and emotional communion. Listeners share further with others. When an emotional event strikes a community, there are as many sources of sharing as members, and each act of sharing reloads the flow. Rimé proposed that such chains of sharing contribute to an emotional climate, and predicted effects on group cohesion and solidarity and on collective memory. These collective predictions are theoretical; they are consistent with Durkheim’s account while locating its mechanism in ordinary communication.

Collective effervescence: testing Durkheim

The gatherings studies

A century after Durkheim, Páez and colleagues set out to test his predictions as a whole (Páez et al., 2015). The article reports four studies, two correlational, one semi-longitudinal and one experimental, of participation in positively valenced gatherings (folkloric marches) and negatively valenced ones (protest demonstrations). Across studies, participation was associated with stronger collective identity, identity fusion and social integration, with higher personal and collective self-esteem and efficacy, with more positive affect, and with more positive social beliefs. Perceived emotional synchrony with others, called emotional communion, mediated these effects. Higher perceived emotional synchrony was associated with stronger emotional reactions, stronger social support and higher endorsement of social beliefs and values. The authors also distinguished perceived emotional synchrony from flow, which was related mainly to efficacy and self-esteem.

The site grades this evidence at level C. Most of the outcomes come from correlational and semi-longitudinal designs, and the abstract does not describe what the experimental study manipulated. People who choose to attend a march may differ from those who do not, and perceived synchrony is itself a self-report measured alongside the outcomes (collective effervescence).

The meta-analysis

A later meta-analytic review synthesised outcomes of collective effervescence during gatherings and demonstrations across 50 samples (Pizarro et al., 2022). Collective effervescence was associated with self-transcendent emotions, group identity, social integration, wellbeing and collective efficacy. Because the pooled studies are mainly correlational, the associations are not evidence that gatherings cause these outcomes (claim).

Synchrony and the body

Laboratory synchrony

Laboratory experiments isolate one ingredient of ritual: moving together. Moving or tapping in synchrony with others increased liking for a partner and later cooperation, including cooperation that required personal sacrifice (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). In a group-dance experiment, synchrony and exertion each raised pain thresholds, an indirect proxy for endorphin activity, and each increased in-group bonding (Tarr, Launay, Cohen, & Dunbar, 2015). These are controlled studies with short tasks, and the outcomes were measured during or shortly after the activity. See interpersonal synchrony.

A ritual in the field

A field study at a Spanish fire-walking ritual measured heart-rate dynamics in 38 participants (Konvalinka et al., 2011). Using recurrence analyses, the researchers identified fine-grained commonalities of arousal over the 30-minute ritual between fire-walkers and spectators who were related to them, but not between fire-walkers and unrelated spectators. Because the fire-walkers and their related observers behaved very differently, the authors suggested that the mediating mechanism may be informational rather than motor. The study shows that a collective ritual can be accompanied by synchronised arousal between performers and bystanders. It measured shared physiological arousal in one ritual and one community; it did not measure shared feeling, wellbeing or later outcomes.

Ritual as regulation

Psychologists have more recently offered a framework that connects these lines of work (Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas, & Inzlicht, 2018). The integrative review proposes that rituals serve three regulatory functions: regulation of emotions, of performance goal states, and of social connection. It distinguishes bottom-up processes, arising from the physical features of rituals such as repetition, rigidity and synchrony, from top-down processes, arising from the meaning rituals have for those who perform them. The framework is designed to generate predictions; it does not test them.

Seen through this framework, the rituals that people describe as cathartic are regulatory in several ways at once. They provide structure when a situation is uncertain; they give intense emotion a sanctioned form and a time limit; they direct attention to shared symbols; and they bring people into physical and emotional alignment. The regulation is real. What it regulates, and for how long, are empirical questions.

Ritual and resolution

How do these theories bear on the distinction between relief and resolution? The following is interpretation, informed by the evidence above.

Shared intensity is produced, not released. Durkheim and Collins both describe emotion generated by gathering, attention and synchrony. The high after a concert or a march fits this description better than the hydraulic picture of stored emotion being let out (Theory 01).

Rituals can mark and support transitions. Funerals, weddings and commemorations do not make grief, change or loss disappear. They give it a shared form, publicly acknowledge what has changed, and mobilise the support of others. In that sense ritual can contribute to resolution, not by ending an emotion but by helping people move into a changed situation with others. This is a theoretical reading; the studies reviewed here did not measure long-term adjustment after such rituals.

Relief can be the reward that brings people back. Collins’s theory predicts that people return to rituals that charge them with emotional energy. The learning principle in Theory 06 makes a similar prediction for relief. A ritual that reliably produces emotional energy or release may be repeated for that reason alone, regardless of whether the difficulties participants bring to it change.

Solidarity is not always benign. The same processes that create belonging can sharpen boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Collins’s model includes a boundary to outsiders as an ingredient, and the gatherings studied include protests, whose collective efficacy is directed against something. The studies cited here measured positive outcomes for participants; they did not measure effects on intergroup relations, and the site has insufficient evidence to say how often collective emotion intensifies hostility.

Evidence is short-term. Most measured outcomes were recorded during an event or shortly after it. There is insufficient evidence that collective rhythm or gatherings reduce the difficulties people bring to them over longer periods (claim).

The artwork at the centre of this site is built around a collective experience of release and ends with problem_solved: false. The theories in this essay explain why both parts can be true at once: a shared experience can generate real emotional energy, connection and relief, and still leave unresolved what brought each person into the crowd.

Where the theories are contested

Functionalism. Durkheim’s account, and to some extent its successors, can read as if rituals exist in order to create cohesion. Critics note that rituals also enforce hierarchy, exclude and coerce, and that the function of a ritual is not the same as its cause.

Measurement of collective emotion. “Perceived emotional synchrony” is a participant’s judgement. Physiological synchrony, as in the fire-walking study, is a different construct. Whether people who report feeling in tune with a crowd are physiologically synchronised with it is not established by the studies cited here, and synchronised arousal does not show shared feeling (Theory 04).

Selection and causality. People who attend gatherings choose to do so, often because they already identify with the group. Correlational designs cannot separate the effects of participation from the characteristics of participants.

From laboratory synchrony to real ritual. Tapping experiments and group dance in a laboratory capture a small part of what a funeral or festival involves. Their results are consistent with ritual theories but do not test them directly.

Durability. Whether effects of collective emotion persist, and for whom, remains largely unknown.

What this essay concludes

Theories of collective emotion describe something the hydraulic model cannot: emotion generated between people through co-presence, shared attention, synchrony and meaning. Durkheim framed it as the renewal of the group, Collins as emotional energy produced by successful interaction, Rimé as the propagation of shared emotion into a climate, and recent psychology as a set of regulatory functions. Research on gatherings and synchrony is consistent with these accounts, mostly through correlational and short-term designs. The picture that emerges is of ritual as a powerful regulator of emotion and belonging. It is not, on current evidence, a reason to believe that a shared experience of release resolves what participants carry into it.