The article focuses on emotions of audiences, i.e. the forms of expression specific to large crowds of people who are acting in copresence and share a common focus of attention. We focus particularly on the ideographic analysis of real-time performances of emotions of large audiences which are addressed by a particular approach in audience research (1). This approach will be applied to the study of
large audiences in religion and in sports, our primary areas of research on audiences
(2). We shall sketch the basic dimensions of these audience emotions resulting from our preliminary studies (3). Audience emotions, we shall propose (4), can be considered as consequences of the collective coordination of communicative action In part 5 we finally address the reasons why these collective forms of communicative action are seen as emotional They draw on a restricted repertoire of forms, and
they affect individuals sensually in a way which is peculiar to collectives.

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