Social sharing of emotions
Scientific studies of catastrophes and important life events demonstrate the propensity of victims to talk about their experiences and express their emotions.
[1][2] At the onset of these empirical studies, Rimé et al. coined the term "social sharing of emotions" in 1991 to name the observed phenomenon.
[3] 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.
In 1991, Rimé et al.[3] 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.
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".
[6] Furthermore, people turn to their social environment to search for clarification when faced with obscure or confusing environmental situations or sensations.
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.
[2] 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.
[3] Furthermore, Rimé et al.[3] offered two defining characteristics of the phenomenon: The first studies about social sharing of emotion explore individual aspects of the process.
These were retrospective studies where participants filled out a questionnaire which asked them to recall a specific personal experience that provoked an emotion.
[2] In these follow-up studies[13][14] the experimenters contacted certain individuals after foreseeable emotional experiences, such as the birth of a child, giving blood, or taking an exam.
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.
[16][17] Research on preadolescents[18][17] found that the targets are still predominantly attachment figures (mother 93%; father 89%), but at this age the social sharing is extended to siblings, sometimes to peers, and can even be to pets, grandparents, or a teddy bear.
Similar to the problems of a restricted educational background, the subjects of the first studies on the social sharing of emotions were limited to Belgian and French populations.
Additionally, these differences could reflect the closeness of the interpersonal relationships in collectivistic cultures, where it can be difficult for individuals to recognize when the social sharing occurs because they are so often together.
The results of the above studies on the social sharing of emotion reveal that such behaviors are very common and are in fact the norm, transcending boundaries of gender, age, level of education, culture, etc.
Along with this idea, psychologists initially hypothesized[29] that the extreme nature of such experiences would play an important role in determining whether an emotional event is shared or not.
Specifically, emotional experiences involving feelings of shame and guilt tend to be shared less frequently, less often, and with fewer people.
There is scientific evidence suggesting that exposure to the narration of an emotional experience has several effects on the target person: increased autonomic arousal among subjects listening to a distressed person,[33] heightened anxiety among subjects who listened to other people disclosing intimate aspects of themselves[34] and depressive and hostile sentiments for subjects exposed to a 15-minute conversation with someone who is depressed[1][32][35] From the above evidence it can be concluded that exposure to the social sharing of an emotion is itself an emotion-eliciting event, it would follow that the listener too would later share that experience with other people.
[32] In the first study, subjects reported particularly strong sentiments of interest and of surprise as a result of hearing someone recount an emotional experience.
In a second study, Christophe et Rimé[32] proposed to subjects to recall an emotional experience according to an intensity level given (low, moderate, high).
In one study, 83% of the participants reported some degree of secondary social sharing in response to both positive and negative emotional situation, with no differences found between these two valences.
Through a series of studies,[1][32][40] a classification of the recipient's general behaviors and responses during social sharing of emotions was created.
Subjects who listened to highly emotional experiences exhibited less verbal expression, attempted less de-dramatization, and much more nonverbal comforting.
In the first two experiments, subjects were invited to watch a short film (non-emotional, moderate and intense emotional conditions) while their partner (a real friend) was given a non-stimulating task to complete.
On the other hand, the partners' comments were found to be brief and to consist mainly of requests for further information and expressions of feelings elicited by the targets' sharing.
As seen in the diagram, social sharing can result in reciprocal affection between the two people involved, and can play an obvious role in attachment.
Following this idea, the collective rituals and symbols are likened to conventional social sharing situations, which both cause a reactivation of the emotions that were lived or relived.
Along these lines, aforementioned social rituals came to be used as a more structured way of re-substantiating beliefs that have been invalidated as a result of an emotional event.
[2] Primary social sharing of emotions involves "repeated reproduction", where the same individuals report their memories of an episode on several different occasions.
