Close-knit Ties Through Thick And Thin:the Roles Of Sharedness And Valence Of Emotional Events In Social Bonding

People often share emotional events with others.For example,they co-experienced the exclusion from their peers,or they were both accepted by the new classmates(colleagues);They mourned the death of their relatives(friends)with others,or jointly witnessed the wedding of their relatives(friends).Conventional wisdom suggests that sharing emotional events can enhance social bonding among the co-experiencers.For example,"sharing happiness and sufferings" or "going through thick and thin" can promote deeper friendship.However,there are few experimental studies to examine whether and how the share of emotional events affect social bonding,our study tries to answer this question.Three experiments were conducted in our study.Experiment 1 examined the effects of shared experience(vs.experience alone)and positive(vs.negative)emotional events on social bonding;Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 repeated the results of Experiment 1 and further explored the mechanism of the effect.Results were shown as follows:(1)both sharing positive emotional events and sharing negative emotional events can enhance social bonding;(2)compared to sharing negative emotional events,sharing positive emotional events can better enhance social bonding;(3)shared experience(vs.experience alone)affected social bonding by perceived similarity,that is,compared to experience alone,shared experience enhanced perceived similarity and in turn enhanced social bonding;Positive(vs.negative)emotional events affected social bonding through the emotion,that is,compared to negative emotional events,positive emotional events enhanced positive emotions and in turn enhanced social bonding.These results will help better understand the formation of cohesion and provide a good practical guiding significance for the organization management and social management.