Social sharing of emotions

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. At the onset of these empirical studies, Rimé et al. coined the term “social sharing of emotions” in 1991 to name the observed phenomenon. 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.

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 out 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 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.

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. 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. 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 Thoits 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 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.

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