The relation between social sharing and the duration of emotional experience

Abstract

People often socially share their emotions to regulate them. Two-mode theory of social sharing states that cognitive sharing will contribute to emotional recovery, whereas socio-affective sharing will only temporarily alleviate emotional distress. Previous studies supporting this theory, measured emotional recovery in terms of residual emotional intensity. Until now, another important time-dynamic aspect of emotions, emotion duration, has been largely ignored. In two experience sampling studies we addressed this gap. In Study 1, participants reported on the duration of anger, fear, and sadness episodes; additionally time-varying information on the occurrence and mode of sharing was collected. This study revealed that sharing led to a shortening in emotion duration, in particular when it was socio-affective in nature. In Study 2 we investigated whether this result could be interpreted in terms of our measure of duration primarily reflecting emotional relief rather than recovery. In this study, the same method as in Study 1 was used; additionally, residual emotional intensity was measured three days after emotion onset. Study 2 largely replicated the findings from Study 1. Furthermore, duration appeared to be empirically distinct from residual intensity. Finally, no relation between sharing and residual intensity was found, even when considering the sharing mode.

Keywords:

• Social sharing
• Two-mode theory
• Emotion duration
• Emotional relief
• Emotional recovery

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant GOA/10/02 from the Research Fund of the University of Leuven. The last author is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO).

Notes

¹Note that our definition of emotions is a fairly broad one that encompasses emotions elicited by minor daily hassles as well as major life events. In addition, it also captures emotions arising from an accumulation of events with a final event being the drop that makes the cup run over. Only emotions arising from an accumulation of events without a final trigger may have been excluded by this definition.

²Note that from the eight to the tenth day of the study only follow-up questions were asked.

³Although a return to baseline went with a non-zero residual intensity, this does not exclude the possibility that duration and residual intensity may be correlated. Therefore, we investigated whether duration correlated with the different indices of residual intensity. These analyses revealed that, across emotions, duration did not correlate strongly and consistently with the different indices. In particular: (1) Duration did not correlate significantly with the intensity of mental images, and the intensity of subjective feelings (except with the case of anger, r=.14, p<.05); (2) Duration correlated with the intensity of bodily sensations for anger (r=.15, p<.05) and fear (r=.18, p<.05) but not for sadness; (3) For all emotions, duration correlated significantly with need for sharing (r=.20 for anger, r=.24 for fear, and r=.23 for sadness, with all ps<.01).

⁴Regarding the possibility that longer episodes provide more opportunities for sharing, we also investigated whether the proportion of intervals in which sharing occurred (as a measure of sharing that is unconfounded with duration) predicted indices of residual intensity, over and above importance and initial intensity. These analyses revealed highly similar results to the ones reported in the paper.