People Around Us Make Our Best and Worst Moments Memorable

A new research shows that the best and the worst experiences in people's lives do not involve individual accomplishments, but that it is the interaction with others that makes them important.

This is the first study of its kind that underlines the importance of social connections for people's happiness and fulfillment.

“Most of us spend much of our time and effort focused on individual achievements such as work, hobbies and schooling, however this research suggests that the events that end up being most important in our lives, the events that bring us the most happiness and also carry the potential for the most pain, are social events -- moments of connecting to others and feeling their connections to us,” says co-author Shira Gabriel, PhD, associate professor of psychology at University of Buffalo.

Many psychological researchers established that what counts most in explaining our most intense emotional experiences are individual experiences, however not the award-winning kind, but rather “the moments when close relationships began or ended,” she added.

“When people fell in love or found a new friend, when a loved one died or broke their hearts, in short, it was the moments of connecting to others that that touched peoples' lives the most.”

To get to these conclusions, Gabriel along with principal author Lisa Jaremka, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mauricio Cavallo, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, carried out four studies on 376 subjects.

The first study asked college students to describe the best and the worst emotional experiences of their lives, and showed that they were much likely to describe social events rather than independent events.

The second study was carried out on middle-aged subjects, that were asked to report on a recent intense emotional experience, and the results were similar.

Study 3 showed that the results of the first two studies were not given by the fact that social events were more spectacular than independent events and the last study demonstrated that for the participants, the social events had a much bigger impact than independent events.

This last study also showed that it is people's need to belong that gives social events their emotional charge.

These findings that contradict what was previously thought, are reported in “What Makes Us Feel the Best Also Makes Us Feel the Worst: The Emotional Impact of Independent and Interdependent Experiences.”

The research for these studies was made at the University at Buffalo and will appear in the next print issue of Self and Identity.