Dynamics of emotional contagion in dense pedestrian crowds

Abstract In places with high-density pedestrian movements, irrational emotions can quickly spread out under emergency, which may eventually lead to asphyxiation and crushing. It was noticed that a pedestrian's emotion in crowd would change as a result of the influence from other pedestrians. Thus, to explore the dynamics of emotion contagion process in flowing dense pedestrians, two types of pedestrian emotions, i.e., negative and positive have been identified. Taking into account the emotional transit of a pedestrian, a crowd movement model is established in the present paper. We simulate pedestrian movement in a region with periodic boundary condition to study the dynamics of emotional contagion in flowing dense crowds. Influences of the initial negative pedestrian proportion, pedestrian crowd density, emotion influence radius, and dose factor on the transition of overall crowd emotion state have been investigated. We expect this study could provide theoretical suggestions for crowd management.