Co-imagination fosters shared emotions of future experiences

Emotions play a crucial role in a host of goal-directed cognitive processes, such as imagining and planning for the future. From hope to despair, shared emotions within representations of the future can motivate farsighted decisions and facilitate social coordination. Though interpersonal dynamics are critical to theories of emotion, imagination has been primarily studied as a process occurring within individuals rather than between them. Nevertheless, humans readily imagine their futures together. Here, we test the hypothesis that such collaborative imagination (co-imagination) of shared future experiences promotes emotional convergence in future event representations among individuals. In two experiments involving university and Prolific participants (N=204), we use natural language models to code individual narratives for a rich and complex array of emotional states. These studies demonstrate that co-imagination in novel dyads fosters alignment in the emotions partners express within their individual representations of the shared future, more so than independently imagining future events using the same cues. This work illuminates a new framework and mechanism for the formation of shared emotions within representations of the future.