Beautiful friendship: Social sharing of emotions improves subjective feelings and activates the neural reward circuitry

Abstract

Humans have a strong tendency to affiliate with other people, especially in emotional situations. Here, we suggest that a critical mechanism underlying this tendency is that socially sharing emotional experiences is in itself perceived as hedonically positive and thereby contributes to the regulation of individual emotions. We investigated the effect of social sharing of emotions on subjective feelings and neural activity by having pairs of friends view emotional (negative and positive) and neutral pictures either alone or with the friend. While the two friends remained physically separated throughout the experiment—with one undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and the other performing the task in an adjacent room—they were made aware on a trial-by-trial basis whether they were seeing pictures simultaneously with their friend (shared) or alone (unshared). Ratings of subjective feelings were improved significantly when participants viewed emotional pictures together than alone, an effect that was accompanied by activity increase in ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex, two important components of the reward circuitry. Because these effects occurred without any communication or interaction between the friends, they point to an important proximate explanation for the basic human motivation to affiliate with others, particularly in emotional situations.

Association between salivary serotonin and the social sharing of happiness

“…Previous studies have indicated that our own emotional states are strongly influenced by the presence of others [4–6]. For instance, one’s positive feelings can be elevated when viewing positive stimuli with a friend, compared to viewing alone [6].…”

Predicting the brain activation pattern associated with the propositional content of a sentence: Modeling neural representations of events and states

“…One of the large‐scale dimensions emerging from the factor analysis assigned high scores to sentences describing people and social interactions. The location of the largest factor‐related cluster (posterior cingulate cortex and the adjacent precuneus region) is known for its role in episodic memory and being a signature of the default mode network [Cavanna and Trimble, ; Gusnard and Raichle, ], and it has also been found to activate during social sharing of emotions versus processing emotion alone [Wagner et al, ], and during thinking about intentional versus physical causality [Ouden et al, ]. Similarly, the medial prefrontal cortex has been associated with social and moral reasoning [Moll et al, ; Van Overwalle, ].…”

Mentalizing and Information Propagation through Social Network: Evidence from a Resting-State-fMRI Study

“…Firstly, the relationships between neural activity and emotional valence have eluded consensus (Lamm et al, 2015; Wagner et al, 2015). In this study, we only measured rs-fMRI and reposting rate of each emotional type in lab, exploring the association between rs-functional connectivity and reposting rate.…”