Collaborative Research: The Role of Stress in Human Crowd Dynamics during Emergency Situations

Northern Illinois University, Dekalb IL

Investigators

Abstract

This grant seeks to understand how stress spreads among people who are evacuating from a space. Evacuating a space quickly and safely during an emergency has life-saving consequences, but it is known that feeling stressed impacts a person’s ability to exit a building quickly. Less understood is how one’s own stress state can contagiously spread to others in a group, potentially exacerbating group stress levels and efficient group movement. This award supports experimental and mathematical research that addresses this complex problem. Experiments with small and large groups will be performed in a controlled space where people’s motion, stress physiology, e.g., heart rate, and emotions will be carefully measured with the aim of determining stress contagion effects on the group. Experimental data will then be examined with computer-based methods to find patterns in how a person’s physiology and emotional state influence their own evacuation behaviors, as well as the stress states and evacuation behaviors of others in the group. These results will then be used to create and test a model that predicts the behavior of an evacuating crowd in high-stress scenarios. This model will offer insight into the complex factors that govern how humans move together under stress, which can inform crowd management strategies to ensure that people interact safely and efficiently with both peers and their environments. Importantly, the mathematical model can be used to test how people behave in scenarios that are unfeasible in laboratory experiments, but which can occur during real emergencies. The project team includes a diverse group of researchers from engineering, mathematics, and psychology to address this challenge while training students and a post-doc as a part of an interdisciplinary collaboration. Research results will be shared via peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and informal public science experiences at local science fairs. Existing mathematical models, while able to qualitatively match the overall motion of an evacuating crowd, they can only partially replicate an individual’s movement, suggesting that they lack critical variables. This project will use state-of-the-art facilities that track multiple people’s positions, with multi-modal measures which index physiological and emotional states, to reconstruct an individual’s stress state and its influence on others’ stress and movement dynamics with high fidelity. Bridging insights across mathematics, engineering, and psychology, this project will clarify the role of physiological and emotional factors–specifically, stress states and contagion–in group dynamics during emergency evacuation. First, multi-modal data from pedestrian experiments will be collected. Information-theoretic analyses of experimental data will quantify the flow of stress information within the evacuating crowd across multiple dynamic features. This will allow dissection of causal influences between stress state, both physiological and emotional, stress contagion, and movement. These relationships will inform a novel agent-based model that includes individuals’ stress features, calibrated to experiments. Model predictions will be tested in further experiments with large crowds. This validated model will provide an ethical proxy for evacuation experiments without inducing undue high stress. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.