ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Assessing the effect of Loving-Kindness Meditation on pain and social well-being using a randomized controlled trial design.PloS one · 2026Trial
- Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Social bonding through shared experiences: the role of emotional intensity.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Collaborative imagination synchronizes representations of the future and fosters social connection in the present.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The effect of gesture expressivity on emotional resonance in storytelling interaction.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Enjoying art: an evolutionary perspective on the esthetic experience from emotion elicitors.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Synchronized affect in shared experiences strengthens social connection.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Banging the drum: evolutionary and cultural origins of music and its implications for psychiatry.BJPsych bulletin · 2023Article
- The origins and function of musical performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Does believing something to be fiction allow a form of moral licencing or a 'fictive pass' in understanding others' actions?Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era.Nature human behaviour · 2022Review
- Managing the stresses of group-living in the transition to village life.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- The influence of sexual arousal on subjective pain intensity during a cold pressor test in women.PloS one · 2022Article
- Neurobiology of Loneliness, Isolation, and Loss: Integrating Human and Animal Perspectives.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- Cochlear SGN neurons elevate pain thresholds in response to music.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Correlation between Enjoying Fictional Narratives and Empathy in Japanese Hikikomori.F1000Research · 2021Article
- Laughter influences social bonding but not prosocial generosity to friends and strangers.PloS one · 2021Article
- Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Neurobiology of Social Distance.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Fiction, whether in the form of storytelling or plays, has a particular attraction for us: we repeatedly return to it and are willing to invest money and time in doing so. Why this is so is an evolutionary enigma that has been surprisingly underexplored. We hypothesize that emotionally arousing drama, in particular, triggers the same neurobiological mechanism (the endorphin system, reflected in increased pain thresholds) that underpins anthropoid primate and human social bonding. We show that, compared to subjects who watch an emotionally neutral film, subjects who watch an emotionally arousing film have increased pain thresholds and an increased sense of group bonding.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.