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, and that this
effect depended on joint attention. We did not observe the convergence and
synchronisation of emotions within dyads, which suggests that experiencing
similar emotions was not necessary for social bonding. We discuss
implications of this study for research on collective effervescence and
the social consequences of shared experiences.