Social bonding through shared experiences: The role of emotional intensity

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects of this phenomenon remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronisation of emotions in the group, and whether these effects generalise across positive and negative emotional contexts. To address these questions, we measured subjective emotional experiences, physiological activity (cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal) and social attitudes in dyads of unacquainted individuals who watched videos in the presence of each other. We manipulated the emotional content of the videos and the type of shared attention between participants, to test for the contribution of interpersonal influence. The results revealed that intense emotions indexed by physiological arousal were associated with the emergence of reciprocal prosocial attitudes within dyads..., , , # Social bonding through shared experiences

Access datasets on Dryad: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g79cnp5zf](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g79cnp5zf)

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## **General information**

### Data collection

Paris, France, 2020

### Language

English

### Content

This repository includes (1) anonymized individual pre-processed psychophysiological data (`data_table.csv`) and their description (`data_dictionary.csv`), and (2) anonymized individual raw and preprocessed physiological time series (`physiology.mat`). Physiological data include cardiac activity (ECG), respiratory activity (RSP) and electrodermal activity (EDA) recorded over five-minute experimental conditions (resting state, positively valenced video, negatively valenced video, and neutral control video). We have also provided R and MATLAB scripts for preprocessing physiological time series and evaluating the effect of emotional valence on psychophysiological data.

### De-Identification

The data set has been modified in t...