عشق پیروزی قدرت تخیل است: خیالبافی در مورد دیگران تا حدود قابل توجهی با افزایش شادی، عشق و ارتباط در ارتباط است

Social relationships and interactions contribute to daily emotional well-being. The emotional benefits that come from engaging with others are known to arise from real events, but do they also come from the imagination during daydreaming activity? Using experience sampling methodology with 101 participants, we obtained 371 reports of naturally occurring daydreams with social and non-social content and self-reported feelings before and after daydreaming. Social, but not non-social, daydreams were associated with increased happiness, love and connection and this effect was not solely attributable to the emotional content of the daydreams. These effects were only present when participants were lacking in these feelings before daydreaming and when the daydream involved imagining others with whom the daydreamer had a high quality relationship. Findings are consistent with the idea that social daydreams may function to regulate emotion: imagining close others may serve the current emotional needs of daydreamers by increasing positive feelings towards themselves and others.

Social interactions and relationships are vital for a healthy, happy and meaningful life (e.g. Baumeister et al., 2012, Diener and Seligman, 2002 and Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010) and contribute to daily emotional well-being. For example, people report feeling happiest when socializing (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) and during interactions with friends (Csikszentmihalyi & Hunter, 2003), and feelings of social connectedness are predicted by social activities and supportive interactions (Reis, Sheldon, Gable, Roscoe, & Ryan, 2000). Despite the emotional benefits of social interaction, a substantial portion of each day is typically spent in the absence of social activity and/or separated from close significant others (e.g. at work). However, even in the absence of social interaction the mind will invariably drift to imagine others and mentally simulate past and possible future social scenarios. Estimates suggest that we spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming (Klinger & Cox, 1987), which is often social in nature (Mar, Mason, & Litvack, 2012). What would the impact of imagining others during daydreaming activity be on momentary feelings: could the influence of others on emotional well-being emerge from the imagination as well as from real events? In the present research we use experience sampling to explore whether everyday social daydreams are associated with increased positive social emotion and whether this depends on who is being daydreamed about.

Overall, 383 of a possible 404 daydreaming questionnaires were completed (192 social and 191 non-social daydreams) corresponding to a 95% response rate. Participants’ daydream descriptions were examined by the first author, in line with the definitions given to participants, to ensure that daydreams were accurately categorized as social or non-social. Twelve non-social daydreams were excluded from the dataset because they contained references to other people which suggested that they may have been instances of social, rather than non-social, daydreams. We chose not to reclassify these as social daydreams because doing so would have led to an unbalanced design. Therefore, the following analyses were based on 179 non-social and 192 social daydreams.