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. 2022 Apr 27:13:853750.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.853750. eCollection 2022.

Shared Reality Can Reduce Stressor Reactivity

Megan R Goldring  1 , Federica Pinelli  1 , Niall Bolger  1 , E Tory Higgins  1
Affiliations

Shared Reality Can Reduce Stressor Reactivity

Megan R Goldring et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

When a person faces a stressor alongside someone else, do they get more or less stressed when the other person agrees that the situation is stressful? While an equally stressed partner could plausibly amplify stress by making the situation seem more real and worthy of distress, we find that social validation during co-experienced stressors reduces reactivity. Specifically, the psychological experience of shared reality calms some people down. In Study 1, 70 undergraduate females who jointly faced a stressful event with someone else reported feeling less anxious when the other person felt the same way about the stressor, relative to when the other person appraised the situation in the opposite way or provided no indication of their appraisal. These findings were reflected in participants' physiological reactivity, especially in the parasympathetic nervous system. In Study 2, we generalize these findings to co-experienced stressors in the daily lives of 102 heteronormative romantic couples in the New York City area. In line with tend-and-befriend theory, we found that shared reality during co-experienced stressors reduced anxiety for almost all females (99% of the sample) and for a minority of males (42% of the sample). Together, these findings unify major theories in health and social psychology by implying that shared reality reduces stressor reactivity, and that this effect is partially moderated by sex.

Keywords: daily diary; psychophysiology; shared reality theory; stressor reactivity; tend and befriend theory.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Schematic of study procedures.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Posterior differences in manipulation checks by condition. SRC, shared reality confirmed; SRD, shared reality disconfirmed; AMB, ambiguous. Solid line represents the 50th percentile and the dotted line on 0 = no difference.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Posterior differences in psychological stress by condition. SRC, shared reality confirmed; SRD, shared reality disconfirmed; AMB, ambiguous. Solid line represents the 50th percentile and the dotted line on 0 = no difference.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Posterior differences in heart rate by condition. Solid line represents the 50th percentile and the dotted line is 0 = no difference.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Posterior differences in PEP (‘Fight or Flight’) by condition. Solid line represents the 50th percentile and the dotted line is 0 = no difference.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Posterior differences in ‘Rest and Digest’ by condition. Solid line represents the 50th percentile and the dotted line is 0 = no difference.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Person-specific model predicted slopes for the effect of shared reality on psychological stress.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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