Co-imagination fosters shared emotions of future experiences

Emotions are central to the adaptive capacity of imagining hypothetical future experiences. From hope to despair, shared emotions about future events motivate planning and prepare us for collective action. Though interpersonal dynamics are critical to theories of emotion, they have been largely absent from theories of imagination, with research considering imagination as a process occurring within rather than between humans. Yet humans also imagine their futures together. Here, we test the hypothesis that such collaborative imagination (co-imagination) of shared future experiences facilitates emotional convergence about future events across individuals. In two experiments, by applying natural language models to code the wide-ranging and high-dimensional expression of emotions, we demonstrate that co-imagination in novel dyads gives rise to shared interpersonal emotional states about future events– beyond individuals independently imagining future events using the same cues. This work sheds light on a new framework and mechanism for the formation of shared emotions about the future.