Better Together? Facial Expressions as a Mechanism Shaping Enjoyment During Shared Experience

We explored the impact of shared experiences on enjoyment, focusing on the role of facial expressions. Participants (N = 190, aged 18-35, recruited in Israel) listened to humorous audio clips with a friend or alone, while their facial expressions were recorded via Zoom. Our primary analysis showed that friend presence influenced enjoyment in a content-dependent way, enhancing enjoyment for knock-knock jokes and reducing it for stand-up. Across both types of humor, friend presence amplified the intensity of happy facial expressions. Complementing these findings, a post hoc mediation analysis revealed that these happy expressions partially accounted for shared experiences' effect on enjoyment, suggesting they are a key mechanism linking social context to affective responses. Friends also exhibited facial-expression synchronization, reflecting communicative responsiveness to one another. Notably, these effects were reduced when participants could not see each other. These findings suggest that facial expressions actively shape enjoyment during shared experiences, offering insight into how people connect and experience the world together.