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

SUBMITTER: Wagner U 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4448023 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature