The social sharing of emotions is a phenomenon in the field of psychology that concerns the tendency to recount and share emotional experiences with others. According to this area of research, emotional experiences are not uniquely fleeting and internal. Scientific studies of catastrophes and important life events demonstrate the propensity of victims to talk about their experiences and express their emotions.Rimé, B. (2005) Le partage social des émotions. Puf. France.Luminet, O. (2008) Psychologie des émotions. Confrontation et évitement. De boeck. Belgique. At the onset of these empirical studies, Rimé et al. coined the term "social sharing of emotions" in 1991 to name the observed phenomenon.Rimé, B., Mesquita, B., Boca, S., et Philippot, P. (1991): Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotion, Cognition & Emotion, 5:5–6, 435–465 This research was a significant development in social psychology because it questioned the accepted view of emotions—that emotions are short-lived and intrapersonal episodes—that was prevalent in the literature. Yet, the first set of experiments revealed that 88–96% of emotional experiences are shared and discussed to some degree. Therefore, the studies concerning the social sharing of emotions contribute a substantial new perspective to the understanding of emotions and their underlying processes.
Background
Context (historic view of emotion) In 1991, Rimé et al. noted that in contemporary scientific research, emotions were considered to be responses to preceding events that are then restrained by self-control and self-restoration. As such, emotions were generally regarded as ephemeral and intrapersonal experiences. Rimé also later pointed outRimé, B. (2009) Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review. Emotion Review 1:60 that attachment theory rendered emotional regulation to be of an interpersonal nature for children, yet to become mature adults one must become autonomous and capable of regulating emotions independently. In the field of psychology a healthy individual is typically seen as "self-contained, independent and self-reliant, capable of asserting himself and influencing his environment".Riger, S. (1993). What’s wrong with empowerment? American Journal of Community Psychology, 21, 279–292. Riger also suggests that this individualistic view of emotional regulation could have been influenced by the context within which it had been studied, i.e. the United States.
Relevant literature
In 1954 Leon Festinger, a well known social psychologist, presented his influential social comparison theory, which proposes that people seek to obtain accurate self-evaluations by comparing themselves to similar others.Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Humun Relariom, 7, 117- 140. Furthermore, people turn to their social environment to search for clarification when faced with obscure or confusing environmental situations or sensations. Thus extending this theory to emotions would posit that after experiencing emotional situations that do not conform to held expectations or that are ambiguous, one would be expected to later share that emotional experience with others. Festinger's other well-known theory of cognitive dissonance, proposed in 1957, offers further evidence for why such a process might occur. Because emotional experiences are unexpected, they can affect one's self-concept and thus challenge one's system of beliefs. According to Festinger, when people's expectations do not manifest themselves, a cognitive dissonance is created between the expectations and reality and people seek to reduce this dissonance by rationalizing the discrepancy.Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanstone, Illinois:Row, Peterson. So after experiencing an emotion, people would be expected to communicate the event with others in order to help reduce their cognitive dissonance. An article by ThoitsThoits, P.A. (1984). Coping, social support, and psychological outcomes. In P. Shaver (Ed.), Review of personalio and social psychology, V ol. 5 . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 219–238. emphasizes the importance of the ability of others to assist in the process of coping. Other people are able to offer new perspectives on interpretations of the emotional event. In previous studies,Rimé, B. (1983). Nonverbal communication or nonverbal behavior? Towards a cognitive-motor theory or non verbal behavior. In W. Doise & S.Moscovici (Eds), Current issues in European social psychology, Vol.I. Cambridge and Paris:Cambridge University Press and Edition de la Maison de Sciences de I’Homme, pp. 85–141.Rimé, B. (1987, January). Le partage social des emotions. Paper presented to the Symposium on Social Psychology and the Emotions, Paris. Rimé concluded that emotions necessitate "cognitive articulation" because of their dense, complex nature. By using language to express an experience, people are forced to classify and organize the contents of the emotions, and furthermore can concretize and objectivize the experience into a script that can be more easily understood. Rimé also notes that the social environment can point people towards socially acceptable ways of defining the experience.
Precursory studies of trauma The idea of the social sharing of emotion derived from studies about emotional trauma. These studies show that after natural disasters, catastrophes, or life-changing events people have a tendency to talk about their experiences and disclose their feelings and emotions. For example, in a 1975 study exploring the psychological reactions to the death of a loved one, it was found that 88% of bereavers felt a need to talk about the event to others.Schoenberg, B., Carr, A.C., Peretz, D., Kutscher, A.H. and Cherico, D.J. (1975) Advice of the bereavd for the bereaved. in B. Schoenberg, I. Gerber, A. Wiener, A.H., Kutscher, D. Peretz and A.C. Carr (Eds), Beravement. Its psychosocial aspects (pp. 362–367). New York: Columbia University Press. Other studies produced similar findings for people who experienced natural disasters and for cancer patients. Rimé later proposed the term "social sharing of emotions" to describe this phenomenon. Research indicates that the strong emotional experiences that are present during and following trauma and crises can be inherently adaptive and can lead to growth in resilience, altruism, and community engagement. In order for this growth to occur, collective engagement and processing of these emotional experiences is necessary.
Definition and central characteristics Social sharing of emotions can be defined as an "interpersonal process" wherein, after an emotional event, "individuals will initiate interpersonal behaviours in which discussing this event and their reactions to it is central". In other words, the social sharing of emotions is the process of reactivating the emotion at a more symbolic level, all taking place as part of ensuing interpersonal interactions.
Furthermore, Rimé et al. offered two defining characteristics of the phenomenon: That the emotion is recalled in a "socially shared language". That this recall is shared with an addressee (even if the addressee is symbolic).
Initial studies The first studies about social sharing of emotion explore individual aspects of the process. These studies aimed to answer questions concerning when it occurs, with whom, how long after the emotional event, if there are age, gender or cultural differences, how often it occurs for a given emotional event, etc.
The first empirical research about the social sharing of emotions was conducted in 1991. These were retrospective studies where participants filled out a questionnaire which asked them to recall a specific personal experience that provoked an emotion. They then were asked to respond to questions related to their social sharing behaviors related to that event. In all of these studies, 88–96% of emotional experiences were followed by social sharing of those experiences at least one time.
However, such retrospective studies were subject to certain biases that may have affected the results. For example, the participants could have been influenced by a number of memory biases such as a possible selective memory bias for events that were more emotionally intense, or a possible bias to more easily recall more recent events.
Because of these possible biases, further studies were conducted using daily diaries. Every night, participants were asked to write down the most significant event of their day and then answer various questions related to the social sharing of that event. In one of these studies (study 2),Rimé, B., Philippot, P., Finkenauer, C., Legast, S., Moorkens, P. and Tornqvist, J. (1994), Mental Rumination and Social Sharing in Current Life Emotion, unpublished manuscript, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique. 58% of emotional events were shared the same day that the event occurred.
There were also further follow-up studies conducted using a different approach. In these follow-up studiesRimé, B., Finkenauer, C., Luminet, O. & Lombardo, S. (1993), A longitudinal study on the social and mental consequences of human dissection among medicine students (study 4) the experimenters contacted certain individuals after foreseeable emotional experiences, such as the birth of a child, giving blood, or taking an exam. This way, the experimenters chose not only the emotional event to be recalled, but furthermore the types of emotional events they would be studying so that they could examine possible differences between types of emotional events. The findings of these studies supported those of the retrospective studies: 96–100% of emotional events were socially shared. Furthermore, no significant difference was found in the frequency of social sharing between different types of emotional events.
While these two methodologies did help to eliminate some of the possible biases of the original studies, they still operated under the assumption that there is a causal link between the emotional experience and the development of the process of social sharing. Therefore, a true experimental method was used to study the phenomenon. In these studies,Luminet, O., Bouts, P., Delie, F., Manstead, A.S.R and Rimé, B. (2000), Social sharing of emotion following exposure to a negatively valenced situation, Cognition and Emotion, 14, 661–668. two friends came together to the laboratory, and they were then split up. One of the subjects watched an excerpt of one of three films: either from a documentary about animals (weak emotion), a violent scene between animals (moderate emotion), or a scene depicting humans committing cruel acts towards animals (strong emotion). During this time, the other subject was given a trivial task to complete. Then, the two subjects were reunited and asked to wait a few minutes for the next part of the experiment. During this time, their conversations were recorded and analyzed for the presence of social sharing. All of these methods produced similar results; social sharing was found to occur for 88–96% of emotional events.
General findings
Gender While there exist strong stereotypes that women express themselves and talk about their emotions with others more than men do, the results from the above studies indicate that on the contrary there are no sex differences concerning the amount of social sharing of emotion between men and women. However, although no such quantitative sex differences were found, one qualitative difference was found between the social sharing behaviors of males and females, and that is with whom they choose to share. Women tend to share their emotions equally between family members, close friends, and spouses/partners. On the other hand, men tend to share more exclusively with their partners/spouses and less so with close friends and family members.
Age