Happy stories are found to synchronize brain activity more than sad stories as the former increases the feelings of closeness between speaker and listener as per a study by the East China Normal University, Society For Neuroscience, published in the journal eNeuro.
The study team compared the impacts of emotional stories on interpersonal connection and communication. The team allowed one study participant (the speaker) to watch happy, sad, and neutral videos followed by self-recording when explaining the video’s contents.
‘Sharing happy stories increases feelings of closeness and brain synchrony more than sad stories.’
The other participants (the listeners) were then asked to listen to the narration and further rate the closeness they felt to the speaker afterward. The team simultaneously measured both the speaker and the listeners’ brain activity with EEG as they completed their tasks.
Brain Synchrony and Happy Story
It was found that sharing happy stories had produced better recall and interpersonal closeness in the listeners. This increased closeness was further linked to increased synchrony between the brain activity of the speaker and listener, particularly in the frontal and left temporoparietal cortices.
These regions are primarily involved in emotional processing and theory of mind, respectively. Thus, the study states that brain synchrony may serve as a measure of successful connection and communication.
Source: Medindia
