It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do.

It isn't just about nice.

And I hope there won't be any emotional scenes on the way down.

Examples of features of group emotions include the level of variability of emotions among members (i.e., affective diversity), the proportion of positive or negative emotions, and the modal (i.e., most common) emotion present in a group.