You may have felt it before — that rush of positive emotion toward the people around you while singing along at a concert or cheering at a big game.

Or maybe you’ve experienced it in smaller, quieter ways, like sensing a kindred energy with the other people typing on their laptops in a coffee shop, or with fellow riders on a bus when something funny happens.

There’s a term for that special kind of emotional experience — collective effervescence — and it’s been a major focus of Shira Gabriel’s research for much of her career.

First coined over a hundred years ago by the famed sociologist Emile Durkheim, it refers to a feeling that Gabriel and her research team have identified as an intertwined sense of connection and sacredness. Collective effervescence has gained fresh prominence in recent years, in part thanks to Gabriel’s work.

Gabriel, a professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Social Self Lab, was a recent guest on University Communications’ Driven to Discover podcast. In her episode she delves into our fundamental need to belong. It’s something she contends is essential to our well-being and has evolutionary roots; humans, she argues, are a fundamentally social species.

“We needed to live in collectives and communicate with those other people in our collectives and cooperate with them in order to pool our resources. And that's what made humans survive,” Gabriel says.

These social capabilities — and social needs — have carried over across the course of our existence and now manifest in wide-ranging and sometimes surprising ways.

Binge-watching your favorite TV show? Sharing silly videos on social media?

According to Gabriel, these activities can hold important social value. Rather than view them as guilty pleasures, she sees them as ways to feel a sense of social embeddedness — that broader feeling that we belong to a society or a world around us.

“That's healthy and good,” Gabriel says. “And in fact, when we have compared those [types of connections] to what we call the more traditional kinds of relationships, what we've found is that they both contribute to well-being, and the people who tend to be happiest are the people who have both.”

On the podcast, Gabriel explores this linkage between human connection and happiness through a scientific lens, gives guidance on cultivating more moments of transcendence in our lives, and shows how leaning into this elemental part of ourselves can help bridge divisions at a time when a sense of shared humanity is sorely needed.