Audience spontaneous entrainment during the collective enjoyment of live performances: physiological and behavioral measurements

Abstract

Cardiac synchrony is a crucial component of shared experiences, considered as an objective measure of emotional processes accompanying empathic interactions. No study has investigated whether cardiac synchrony among people engaged in collective situations links to the individual emotional evaluation of the shared experience. We investigated theatrical live performances as collective experiences evoking strong emotional engagement in the audience. Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis was applied to obtain the cardiac synchrony of twelve spectators' quartets attending to two live acting performances. This physiological measure was then correlated with spectators' emotional intensity ratings. Results showed an expected increment in synchrony among people belonging to the same quartet during both performances attendance and rest periods. Furthermore, participants' cardiac synchrony was found to be correlated with audience's convergence in the explicit emotional evaluation of the performances they attended to. These findings demonstrate that the mere co-presence of other people sharing a common experience is enough for cardiac synchrony to occur spontaneously and that it increases in function of a shared and coherent explicit emotional experience.

Figure 1

Results of Principal Component Analyses conducted on the explicit ratings of the two monologues. Panel a: November 20^th; Panel b: August 10^th. Red = component 1; light blue = component 2; green = component 3. PERF:in performance; TEXT: in text fear = Fear intensity; anger = Anger intensity; sadness = Sadness intensity; emo int = Emotional intensity; quality = Performance Quality; emo eng = Emotional involvement.

Figure 2

Differences in percentage recurrence, entropy and max diagonal length between in-group and out-group. Error bars depicted SE, * = p < 0.05.

Figure 3

Panel a: correlation plots between participants’ mean in-group CRQA metrics and in-group convergence scores; Panel b: correlation plots between participants’ mean out-group CRQA metrics and out-group convergence scores; Panel c: exemplificative cross recurrence plots (CRP) for high and low in-group convergent participants. Low in-group convergence score corresponds to low participant’s rating deviation from in-group members’ scores. *Bonferroni corrected p < 0. 0125.

Figure 4

Experimental procedure.