Alyssa Birnbaum

You felt like you truly cared.

You felt mutually connected.

And when you left, you felt a little more energized and uplifted.

And it didn't necessarily need to be a happy experience.

It could have been about something difficult and raw, but you felt more bound together.

That's a high quality connection.

And I was curious about whether having higher quality connections throughout the day led to higher levels of engagement at the end of the day.

And what I found was fascinating.

Yes, it did lead to higher levels of engagement, but it didn't matter how many interactions you had or how long you spent in those interactions.

So if you spent your entire day having high quality interactions with different people or just one high quality connection with one person,

you still tended to feel more engaged.

I was also curious about the way that people were interacting.

I wanted to know if you needed to be in person face-to-face in order to have these deep, meaningful connections, because previous researchers suggest that you do need to be in person in order to have those deep connections.

So I asked people how they interacted.

Were you in person and face-to-face?

Were you video conferencing with the camera on?

Or were you chatting through audio?

And audio could be a phone call, it could be video conferencing with the camera off.

And what I found was that there was no difference between in-person connections and video conferencing with the camera on.

So in other words, if we're chatting face to face, or if we're chatting through video conferencing and we can see each other, we're able to connect in a similar way.