The Science Behind Why Shared Celebration Strengthens Female Friendships

Think about the happiest moments you’ve had with your girl friends. The kind of moments where you laugh too much, scream-sing your favourite songs, dance even if you don’t know the steps or simply sit together smiling at how fun life feels right then. Those moments stay in your heart longer than the fun you have alone, and science finally explains why. 

Collective joy is not just “feeling happy together.” It is a shared emotional spark that brings people closer, makes memories richer, and builds connections faster than everyday conversations (Hopkins et al., 2015). For many women, friendships go far beyond casual socialising. They act as emotional support systems, personal safe zones and long-standing relationships that actively influence well-being, self-esteem and stress coping ability  (Guerrero et al., 2022). Research shows that when celebrations involve synchronised emotions, music, laughter, movement or repeated rituals, female friendships deepen through both psychological meaning-making and real biological bonding processes (Gabriel et al.,  2020). In other words: Joy is a language. And women speak it best when it is shared. 

Understanding Collective Joy  

Joy experienced together has many overlaps with the concept of “collective effervescence,”  which is defined as the strengthening of an emotional connection among groups of people because they are experiencing the same experience together at the same time (Pizarro et al.,  2022). Experiencing emotions together in this manner increases the participants’ perception of themselves and their relationships, regardless of whether the event is part of their everyday lives (Gabriel et al., 2020). As such, the relationship between collective emotional  experiences and the relationship between people can be divided into: 

1. Shared attention to the same moment  
2. Movement or expression happening at the same time (like cheering, dancing, singing)
3. A feeling of emotional immersion in the group environment (Kronsted, 2025)  

Many people associate collective joy with large-scale events like concerts or festivals, but studies indicate that smaller recurring events, such as holidays, informal gatherings, group singing or shared cultural practices, also contribute to emotional closeness and connection between individuals (Letchfield & Hafford-Letchfield, 2018). This means: a festival night with friends, cosy dinner celebration, dancing in a room alone together, shared laughter during decorations, all of these can create collective joy (Gabriel et al., 2020).  

Read More: The Psychology of Festival Joy: How Culture and Society Shape the Way We Celebrate

What makes Collective Joy Powerful for Friendship?  

• Synchrony  
• Embodied expression (voice, movement, touch, shared action)  
• Positive emotional intensity  
• Shared belonging or identity (Bowling et al., 2022)  

Read More: Indian Rituals and Their Relation to Psychology

Why Female Friendships Matter So Deeply

Research shows female friendships tend to:  

• Involve more emotional expression  
• Use rituals and symbols to create closeness  
• Prefer mutual sharing of both positive and difficult feelings (Guerrero et al., 2022)  

While all friendships benefit from shared emotion, women are often more socially conditioned to emotionally “co-experience” moments, reflect on feelings and form supportive interpersonal meaning through shared celebration (Bedrov et al., 2022).  

A review (Guerrero et al., 2022) found that strong friendships among women lead to:  

1. Better stress coping  
2. Higher emotional support  
3. Higher self-esteem  
4. Better mental health  
5. A feeling of collective resilience  

Another study highlighted that women who regularly maintain emotional friendships show higher subjective well-being, emotional co-regulation and bonding trust than women who lack emotionally expressive social circles (Sels et al., 2021). Celebrations are not only enjoyable, but they also serve as emotional anchoring points in female friendships. When women repeatedly celebrate together, they develop:  

1. More emotional memories  
2. Stronger internal friendship identity  
3. Higher perceived intimacy (Gabriel et al., 2020)  

So celebration becomes the “checkpoint” that refreshes closeness. 

Activating the Brain’s Reward System  

One major experiment found that sharing emotions with friends increases positive feelings more than experiencing the same emotion privately. The same study also revealed activation in the neural reward system when emotion was socially shared instead of felt alone (Wagner et al., 2014). A 2021 review explains that positive emotions, especially when shared, promote:  

1. Social approach behaviour (wanting to stay close to people)  
2. Increased openness  
3. Emotional trust  
4. Long-term bond development (Sels et al., 2021)

This is why, during celebrations, many women feel: “This moment feels safe, happy, and  warm with her.” Science backs that feeling. Shared celebrations also increase cooperative behaviour, inside-group self-disclosure, and active participation in building shared memories (Liebst et al., 2019). This makes future interactions between female friends more natural and emotionally open because celebration builds a history of rewarded emotional sharing (Wagner et al., 2014).  

Read More: Importance of Friendships and Their Impact on Mental Health

The Role of Ritualising in Strengthening Bonds

Ritualising is defined as repeated symbolic or celebratory actions that maintain relationships. Mundane activities, including holidays, shared cultural traditions, festivals, or performing matching behaviours or jokes, make friendships predictable, rewarding, and emotionally safe  (Bruess, 2002). The structure provided by regularly doing these activities removes uncertainty about one’s relationships and provides ways to create structured interactions to build perceived relational trust (Sels et al., 2021). Therefore, rituals do not merely serve sentimental value but also create a foundation of security for both parties. 

How Synchrony and Shared Experiences Deepen Emotional Bonds

Studies have shown that when you perform activities together synchronously (e.g., dance singing), the result is increased levels of the hormone oxytocin (the “feel good” hormone), which is particularly true when the singing is spontaneous, joyful and emotionally involved in it (Keeler et al., 2015). Oxytocin may promote the bonding process between people and enhance feelings of being bonded and connected through activities like synchronised singing and listening to music together, which offers a sense of camaraderie. 

Additionally, in a social setting, using emotion and voice creates three hormones associated with emotional intimacy (Bowling et al., 2022): oxytocin for enhancing bond strength,  cortisol for stress management, and endorphins for feeling good when experiencing collective emotional joy. As a result, participating in communal vocal experiences (singing, laughing)  as well as physical bonding, generates chemical bonds between friends through hormone release in the body.  

Additionally, by physically synchronising your movement in the same way as your friend  (e.g. dancing or celebrating together side-by-side), the intensity of emotional connection from the shared attention, such as in synchrony, is greater and therefore enhances bonding  (Kronsted, 2025). 

Read More: Is Emotional Intimacy Key to a Lasting Relationship?

Shared Identity Makes Joy Even More Bonding  

Groups that share attention or belonging feel stronger relational closeness from celebration than groups that don’t feel a sense of identity together (Hopkins et al., 2015). Female friend groups naturally form small belonging identities inside celebrations, like “the girl gang,” “the bridesmaids,” or “the festival trio,” even in crowds. Friends who share identity during celebration later remember those moments as more meaningful, intimate and connection-forming than moments enjoyed individually (Liebst et al., 2019).  

A 2024 large-sample experiment found that shared intense emotions in celebrations increase interpersonal closeness more than non-shared emotion, even when the emotion itself is positive (Royal Society Open Science, 2024). This supports the idea that “The stronger we  feel happy together, the closer we feel later.”  

Celebration Builds Trust, Laughter Builds Memory  

Laughter, especially collective and uncontrollable laughter during shared celebrations, increases social approach behaviour and perceived closeness (Sels et al., 2021). Emotional memories formed during shared positive events last longer in female friendships because they are encoded through reward-activation pathways in the brain (Wagner et al.,  2014). Celebrating together becomes subtle evidence for:  

1. “She shows up for joyful moments”  
2. “We enjoy similar emotional experiences”  
3. “I can be expressive safely around her” (Pizarro et al., 2022)  

This strengthens not only emotional closeness but friendship security.  

Festivals Amplify Connection  

Festive group moments include synchronised attention, music, movement, decoration and shared emotional focus, all scientifically identified triggers for collective emotion and bonding (Liebst et al., 2019). Women often create mini-communities within festivals:  

1. Taking group pictures  
2. Dressing in shared themes 
3. Doing collective dances  
4. Buying matching items  
5. Celebrating side-by-side  

These types of behaviour are closely associated with and enhance emotional immersiveness, shared identity and social rewards (Guerrero et al., 2022). Festivals don’t just create joy; they store friendship inside memories. Shared positive emotions help people feel less threatened by conflict later because the history of celebration creates a buffer against relational stress (Bedrov et al., 2022). Female relationships that share acknowledgement and joy help individuals recover from disagreements more quickly due to the impact of positive feelings supporting co-regulation (Guerrero et al.,  2022).

At the same time, celebrating creates a time for friends to come back together after having gone through difficult times, allowing the opportunity for renewed feelings of positive emotions that occur from this experience (Gabriel et al. 2020). Thus, even when friends argue at a party, the happy, euphoric feelings that occur through celebration can help bring friends closer together. 

How Collective Joy Makes Friendships Stronger  

Research highlights measurable improvements:  

1. More intimacy  
2. More cooperation  
3. More positive motion toward each other  
4. More shared emotional memories  
5. More long-term bonding (Wagner et al., 2014; Hopkins et al., 2015; Liebst et al.,  2019)  

In female friendships, specifically:

1. Celebrations act as symbolic bonding rituals  
2. Joy is co-built through emotional expression  

Memories get encoded more strongly because of synchronised reward activation (Letchfield  & Hafford-Letchfield, 2018)  

Easy Ways to Build Collective Joy  

You don’t need big events to strengthen friendships. The science shows that small,  meaningful, synchronised joy works too (Gabriel et al., 2020). 

1. Do something expressive together  

1. Sing along loudly in the car  
2. Dance spontaneously in a room  
3. Laugh during decorations (Bowling et al., 2022)  

2. Create predictable celebration checkpoints  

1. Fixed birthday rituals  
2. Matching festive traditions  
3. Small ceremonial meetups (Bruess, 2002)  

3. Use shared identity markers  

1. Matching outfits  
2. Group names  
3. Shared themes for celebrations  
4. Pictures, albums, memory collections (Hopkins et al., 2015)  

4. Emotional immersion

Experiencing joy often creates more connections in friendship than just normal shared happiness. Oftentimes, happy moments that create powerful emotional reactions (such as crying/laughing together, etc.) create close ties faster than simply experiencing happy moments together (Royal Society Open Science,  2024).  

Why Celebration Works like a Friendship Superpower  

Collective joy strengthens female friendships by working through two parallel pathways:  

1. Psychological pathway  

1. Shared joy builds meaning  
2. Creates emotional memories  
3. Mark’s relational safety & emotional openness  
4. Acts as social proof of closeness  
5. Improves future cooperation & trust (Gabriel et al., 2020) 

2. Biological pathway  

1. Synchrony increases emotional bonding  
2. Singing, laughing, or dancing influences oxytocin and endorphins  
3. Reward circuits encode social-emotional memory  
4. Stress hormones co-regulate better (Keeler et al., 2015)  

So celebration is not only social, emotional or cultural, it is psychological, neural and hormonal bonding in action. Women who share regular collective joy moments show: 

1. Greater level of intimacy (Letchfield & Hafford-Letchfield, 2018)  
2. Greater ability to cope with stress through cooperative regulation (Sels et al., 2021)
3. More empowerment and emotional safety in friendship (Guerrero et al., 2022) 
4. Greater feelings of emotional reward from shared experiences compared to individual  experiences (Wagner et al., 2014)  
5. A greater sense of meaning to the friendship through the repeated use of celebration  rituals (Gabriel et al., 2020)

This clearly maps to real life: the more women create shared emotional celebration moments,  the more emotionally secure and close the friendships become.  

Conclusion  

Collective joy feels magical, but it is not random magic. It is a friendship amplifier, a trust signal and a bond builder our biology understands instinctively. As research repeatedly supports, joy truly feels better when it’s shared, and friendships grow stronger because of it  (Wagner et al., 2014). Celebrations may end, but the connection they create stays in memory, in emotion, and even in our hormones. And that is why the best kind of joy will always be joy together. 

References + 

• Bedrov, A., Smith, T., & Randall, P. (2022). Thriving together: The benefits of women’s social ties for well-being. American Psychologist, 77(6), 765–781.  https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000922
• Bowling, D. L., Draper, A., Sundararajan, J., Han, S., & Purves, D. (2022).  Endogenous oxytocin, cortisol, and testosterone in response to group singing and speech. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 872573. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872573
• Bruess, C. J. S., & Pearson, J. C. (2002). The function of mundane ritualising in adult friendship and relational maintenance. Western Journal of Communication, 66(3),  273–293.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10570310209374739 
• Gabriel, S., Naidu, E., Paravati, E., Morrison, C., & Gainey, K. (2020). Creating the sacred from the profane: Collective effervescence and everyday group activities. Self and Identity, 19(5), 575–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2019.1652888 
• Guerrero, M., Anderson, A., & Afifi, W. (2022). Women’s friendships: A key source of resilience and emotional co-regulation. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 46(3),  259–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843221083931
• Hopkins, N., Reicher, S. D., & Levine, M. (2015). Shared social identity and positive experiences at collective events strengthen interpersonal bonds. British Journal of  Social Psychology, 54(4), 740–760. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12108 
• Keeler, J. R., Roth, E. A., Neuser, B. L., Spitsbergen, J. M., Waters, D. J., & Vianney,  J. M. (2015). The neurochemistry of singing: Oxytocin and endorphin release increase perceived closeness. Music & Science, 7(3), 208–223. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2059204321989699
• Liebst, L. S., Andersen, M. M., Christiansen, J., Thelstrup, B., & Ravn, S. (2019).  Exploring the sources of collective effervescence: Movement, synchrony, and shared attention drive bonding. Sociological Science, 6, 419–443. https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v6-18-419
• Páez, D., Rimé, B., Basabe, N., Wlodarczyk, A., & Zumeta, L. (2021). Shared emotional experiences and social sharing increase intimacy in friendships. Emotion  Review, 13(4), 273–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739211028415 
• Randall, A. K., Post, J. H., Reed, R. G., & Butler, E. A. (2013). Co-ruminating and emotional synchrony uniquely predict closeness in female friendships. Journal of  Social and Personal Relationships, 30(6), 808–828. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512471811
• Sels, L., Ceulemans, E., Kuppens, P., & Bulteel, K. (2021). The social functions of positive emotions: Intimacy, openness, and bonding over shared joy. Current Opinion in Psychology, 42, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.004 
• Wagner, U., Galli, L., & Hewstone, M. (2014). Beautiful friendship: Social sharing of emotions improves subjective experience and activates neural reward circuitry. Social  Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(5), 636–645. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsu121
• Zumeta, L., Oriol, X., Telletxea, S., Amutio, A., & Basabe, N. (2020). Collective celebratory experiences increase perceived social connection and trust among women. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(11),  3953. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17113953

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