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# Good news lands when it is felt together
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/sharing-good-news/
- Published: 2026-09-15T05:29:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T05:29:21.000Z
- Description: A new study from the University of California San Diego on what happens when we share good news finds the magic is not in understanding the teller. It is in feeling glad alongside them.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Sustainable Living, All stories

You got the job, the scan was clear, the seedlings came up. First thing, most of us tell someone, and psychologists have long known that telling makes the good thing feel bigger. What they had not pinned down was which part of the listener does the work. A study from the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego, by Gregory Depow, Christopher Oveis, Amie Gordon of the University of Michigan and Yumeng Gu, published in the journal Emotion in July, paired 103 strangers, 206 people in all, and asked each pair to talk about something good that had happened to one of them. Afterwards each person watched the recording and rated, moment by moment, what they and their partner had been feeling. Across the pairs one thing stood out. When the listener felt the good feeling too, the sharer rated the response as warm and supportive. Understanding the teller, or caring about them, mattered less than simply catching the feeling.

There is a gentle lesson in it for a publication like this one, and for anyone who reads it. Good news is not a report; it is something two people hold at once. That is why we write the way we do, and why a story about a bay recovering or a forest growing back is better read aloud to someone at the kitchen bench than scrolled past alone. In the researchers' own words, feeling positive emotions with others, more than understanding or caring for their emotions, goes with the responses that make good news land. It costs nothing, and by their measure it is most of the point.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the paper is Build better relationships: Positive empathy and capitalization, by Gregory John Depow, Amie M. Gordon, Yumeng Gu and Christopher Oveis, in Emotion, published by the American Psychological Association on 23 July 2026; the findings are associations, among strangers, as the authors note. Photograph: Unsplash.

- [Build better relationships: Positive empathy and capitalization](https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001707) Emotion, 23 July 2026.
- [Preprint, free to read](https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cqrg4%5Fv1) PsyArXiv, May 2026.