Published in

American Psychological Association, Emotion, 6(14), p. 1062-1071

DOI: 10.1037/a0037604

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

To share, or not to share? Examining the emotional consequences of social sharing in the case of anger and sadness

Journal article published in 2014 by Karen Brans, Iven Van Mechelen, Bernard Rimé, Philippe Verduyn ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Previous research has shown the relation between social sharing and emotional processing to be notoriously complex. In the present study, we unraveled this complexity by, for the first time, taking 3 key aspects of this relation into account simultaneously: the nature of the emotion, the timing of possible sharing effects, and the multicomponential character of emotions. Using the day reconstruction method, we first identified an intense anger or sadness target episode for each participant. In a second phase, participants repeatedly reported their sharing behavior and intensity of different emotion components over 5 days. Growth curve analyses revealed that sharing anger leads to several immediate and delayed beneficial effects, whereas sharing sadness leads to limited positive effects that emerge later on. This implies that all 3 aspects under study, as well as their interplay, are of critical importance in the relation between sharing and emotional processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).