Go to any movie theater, sports venue, or airport, and it’s obvious there’s an intangible bond that forms from laughing, crying, and simply feeling while brushing shoulders with others. Research has long backed up this sense of connection, but some aspects of the phenomenon remained unclear. Now, a new study is offering insight.
The results showed that strong bonds were indeed created when people experienced big emotions together — but only if they could see each other.
Pairs of strangers watched three types of videos together: positive (a comedy), negative (a clip about captive animals), and neutral (a recording of a university library) with a curtain between them that was either open or closed. In addition to participants self-reporting their feelings, their heart rates, respiratory rates, and skin conductance levels were monitored.
Both the positive and negative videos were associated with stronger physiological and emotional responses compared to the neutral one. And when participants could see each other, they rated their feelings as more intense and displayed more physical signs of connectedness.
“We found that silently watching emotional films together with another individual is associated with social bonding, even when this person is a stranger and without any verbal communication,” Victor Chung, the study author, told The Guardian.
Chung and his colleagues used the skin conductance test to measure for objective, or physical, levels of social connectedness. Subjective levels were determined through questionnaires: At the start and end of the experiment and after each film, participants were asked about their attitudes toward their partners and whether they had any desire for future social interactions.
“Overall, we showed that social bonding between unacquainted individuals depends not only on who they are and how they feel about each other in the first place but also on the intensity of the emotions they experience and their perceptual awareness of the presence of each other,” the authors wrote in the paper, published Oct. 30 in Royal Society Open Science.
The team added that the findings may help explain why people seek out group activities that elicit strong emotions, “even participating in sad commemorations or attending dramatic narrative fictions that induce negatively valenced emotions.” In other words, because emotion bonds us, and humans have a fundamental desire to belong, we’re up for experiences one might think we’d naturally want to avoid.
Speaking to The Guardian, Chung also noted the results could illuminate the art of making connections in other contexts.
“Our findings suggest that experiencing intense emotions with others, even during brief interactions with strangers, plays a role in the emergence of social relationships and the formation of social groups,” he said. And now we’re inspired to book movie tickets!
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