The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yoojin Chung, whose interest is in emotional contention in collective online co-viewing: watching the same show together across several locations, while also seeing each other’s faces and reactions. This can be facilitated for instance via platforms like Teleparty, previously known as Netflix Party, which is now used by some 20 million people worldwide and hosts some 700,000 co-viewing events per month.
Such collective experiences may be affected by social conformity, where participation patterns converge due to social peer pressure, and emotional contagion, where emotional expressions are automatically and unconsciously synchronised through feedback loops between peers. These may depend on the size of the co-viewing group, and/or on the valence of the emotions expressed.
Facial expressions are critical to this, and are fairly reliable and universally interpretable indicators of internal emotional states. Seven fundamental emotions are generally recognised: joy, sadness, surprise, a neutral state, anger, disgust, and fear.
This study recruited some 150 participants in South Korea; three quarters of these were female. Inspired by a previous conformity experiment that tested how easily participants could be pressured into conforming with false cues from peers, this fed incorrect emotional responses into the co-viewing interface, and tested emotional contagion for co-viewing experiences variously involving three or eight co-viewers. Facial synchronisation between participants was then analysed using computer vision techniques.
Group size and valence had a considerable impact on emotional contagion: smaller groups are more emotionally contagious, and happy emotions are especially contagious here.
