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Our everyday experience of crowds (on public transport, busy streets, train stations, etc.) is often unpleasant, and the negative valence of this experience is a priori related to the density of people present. However, some experiences of dense crowds such as those at festivals, concerts or sports gatherings for example, are not as unpleasant, and can even be perceived as positive (Alnabulsi & Drury, 2014; Neville & Reicher, 2011). Consequently, these authors (and others such as Novelli et al., 2013) suggest social identity theory as an explanation for valence of crowd experience. Through shared social identity, members of a crowd would be more connected to each other compared to other crowds without a shared social identity, thus making the crowd experience more positive (Novelli et al., 2013; Hopkins et al, 2015). On the other hand, other works have focused on attributional processes, thus on an intra-individual level of analysis (Pedersen, 2006; Krieglmeyer et al., 2009). They show that the causality and intentionality attributed to others to explain their behaviors have an impact on individuals' mental and emotional states. The overall goal of the present research is therefore to explore the relative impact of social identity as well as attributional processes on the valence of crowd experiences - specifically on crowd members' emotional and mental states - in addition to the physical density of people in the crowd.

Our everyday experience of crowds (buses, public transports, commercial streets...) is often unpleasant. And the negative valence of this experience is related to the physical density of people present. However, some experiences of dense crowds such as those at festivals, concerts or sports stadiums are not as unpleasant and can even be perceived as positive (Alnabulsi & Drury, 2014; Neville & Reicher, 2011). Consequently, these authors (and others, such as Novelli et al., 2013) suggest social identity theory as an explanation for valence of crowd experience. Through shared social identity, members of a crowd would be more connected to others compared to crowds with no shared identity, thus making the crowd experience more positive (Novelli et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2015). A previous study of ours has explored the roles of physical density, shared social identity and attribution of intent to others as potential predictors of the valence of crowd experience. The goal of the current study is to replicate this study with a larger sample size, in order to explore the interaction between physical density and shared social identity. We also aim to measure other dependent variables related to the emotional experience (emotions, feeling of crowding) as well as the social experience of crowd members (perception of others, liking of others, aggression towards others, sensory experience related to others).