2005/07/01 by Emmanuelle Zech, Bernard Rimé · 214 citations
Psychology · #Mental Health via Writing #Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Psychology #Emotional expression #Session (web analytics) #Social psychology #Control (management) #Event (particle physics) #Emotional contagion #Perceived control #Emotional control #Cognition
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/cpp.460
published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 12(4), 270-287 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2005/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
Abstract People generally share their emotions with others and believe that they will recover from their emotions after having talked about them. The aims of the present studies were to examine whether (1) talking about a specific emotional episode really facilitates emotional recovery (‘recovery’ effect) and (2) talking about emotions leads to perceived benefits (‘perceived benefits’). Consistently in the two studies, a decrease of emotional impact was found over time for participants in all conditions. Contrary to expectations, participants assigned to talk about their emotions did not demonstrate beneficial recovery effects at 3 or 7 days or 2 months compared with participants assigned to a factual description of the event (experiment 1), to the expression of another emotional event (experiment 2), to a trivial control condition (experiments 1 and 2) or to a non‐talking condition (experiment 2). However, in the two experiments, participants assigned to talk about negative emotional experiences reported more subjective benefits from the session than control participants. The role of personal beliefs about the effects of social sharing of emotion is discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.