Can you trust your gut on a crowd's mood?

(Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology) There is good news for frequent public speakers. New research shows that individuals have the ability to quickly and accurately identify a crowd's general emotion as focused or distracted, suggesting that we can trust our first impression of a crowd's mood. The paper, 'Mixed emotions: Sensitivity to facial variance in a crowd of faces,' was recently published in the Journal of Vision.