What is it about?
Believing that we are feeling the same emotions as others makes us happy and feel like we belong. This article explains how we can achieve a feeling of shared emotions through adapting our memories of times together. Through this process we can make sadder times happier and create a remembered shared reality where none existed.
Featured Image
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Although there is much work in psychology om shared emotion there is little that considers how a perception of this can be achieved through memory malleability. Our ability to adapt our memories to create remembered shared emotions has important implications for wellbeing interventions but also for the marketing of products that create shared moments and shared memories.
Perspectives
The malleability of memory and the purpose this plays in our individual and social wellbeing fascinates me. Humans are able to create moments of 'oneness' in memory that may not have happened in reality. The desire to feel others felt the same as us makes us create a memory of that happening. For me this suggests that in the moment experience is far less influential on our wellbeing, attitudes and behaviours than remembered experience.
Professor Emma Harriet Wood
Leeds Beckett University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: I Remember How We All Felt: Perceived Emotional Synchrony through Tourist Memory Sharing, Journal of Travel Research, December 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0047287519888290.
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