Is That How Everyone Really Feels? Emotional Contagion with Masking for Virtual Crowds

Many simulations use emotional contagion to simulate how groups of humans behave in emotionally charged environments. These models either have each individual agent conform to a group emotion, or have emotional spirals. However, these models do not include well known phenomenon such as displaying and receiving emotions through different means of communication, or having emotions masked by an agent’s desired display emotion. We create a model of emotional contagion that considers multiple channels to communicate on. We also provide a method for agents to mask their emotions, which is used to control the spread of contagion between agents, and can prevent emotional spirals. We demonstrate our model with a sample scenario, and show the effects of having multiple channels and emotional masking on the overall emotional contagion for several groups of agents.