Happy storytelling promotes emotional contagion and interpersonal closeness

Abstract

Storytelling is an important part of human’s daily life. It is a powerful means to share emotions with others. Thus, individuals’ autobiographical memory is a suitable carrier of intentional emotional contagion. Few researchers have explored intentional emotional contagion using individuals’ autobiographical memory, especially people’s neural responses to individuals’ autobiographical memory, and the corresponding mental mechanism of emotional contagion has not been sufficiently clarified. This study investigated the intentional emotional contagion in people’s daily conversation using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy technique comprising two phases. The first phase involved speakers’ video production. In the second phase, the videos were presented to the listeners, during which we obtained listeners’ brain activities while they viewed the videos. The behavioral results showed that compared with the outcome from neutral stories, the degree of emotional contagion induced by happy stories and the degree of overlap between the speaker and the listener were larger. The brain results demonstrated that neutral stories induced greater activation than happy stories in channel 11 and channel 15. These results suggest that to be a happy girl is quite easy and sharing happiness promotes closeness. Future research directions are also provided.