Increasing experience sharing through regulation instructions

Abstract

Experience sharing is an individual’s tendency to resonate with and take on the sensory, motor, and affective experiences of others. While traditional conceptualizations of this process argue its automaticity, recent literature suggests it may have a motivational component. This study aimed to investigate whether individuals can be motivated to increase experience sharing through deliberate instructions. This study also investigated the role of individual differences such as psychopathic traits in this upregulation process. To this end, healthy undergraduates completed two experience sharing-related tasks while having subjective and physiological metrics of experience sharing collected. The results of the study suggest that experience sharing can be increased through deliberate instructions, depending on the valence of the stimulus presented. Moreover, psychopathic traits were associated with greater physiological experience sharing.