NegEmotion: Explore the Double-Edged Sword Effect of Negative Emotion on Crowd Evacuation

In emergencies, negative emotion has a significant impact on decision-making during crowd evacuation. Psychological studies suggest that negative emotion in decision-making has a double-edged sword effect. Excessive negative emotion has adverse impacts, such as causing crowd chaos and congestion. Conversely, moderate negative emotion has a positive effect by speeding up crowd movement. However, current researches mainly focus on one aspect which is how to reduce the negative effects of negative emotion on crowd evacuation, while overlooking the benefits of negative emotion. How to fully explore the double-edged sword effect of negative emotion and regulate negative emotion to improve the efficiency of crowd evacuation is still an open issue. To achieve this, we propose the NegEmotion model which considers the positive impact of negative emotion on crowd evacuation, and regulates crowd emotion by controlling knowledge spreading according to Siminov's psychological principle. In this model, the knowledge spreading network (KSN) and the stress emotional contagion network (SECN) are constructed. Based on these networks, we study the evolution process of knowledge spreading and stress emotional contagion, respectively. Next, we formulate the emotional regulation as an optimization problem to maximize the efficiency of crowd evacuation. Then, a heuristic algorithm is used to solve for the optimal emotional regulation strategy. Finally, a crowd simulation system is implemented to verify the effectiveness of our NegEmotion model. The experimental results show that our method is effective to improve the efficiency of crowd evacuation.