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Is talking about an emotional experience helpful? Effects on emotional recovery and perceived benefits

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Zech, Emmanuelle [UCL] Rimé, Bernard [UCL]

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 (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Publication date 2005
Language Anglais
Journal information "Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy : an international journal of theory and practice" - Vol. 12, no. 4, p. 270-287 (2005)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher John Wiley & Sons Ltd (Chichester)
issn 1063-3995
e-issn 1099-0879
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL
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Bibliographic reference Zech, Emmanuelle ; Rimé, Bernard. Is talking about an emotional experience helpful? Effects on emotional recovery and perceived benefits. In: Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy : an international journal of theory and practice, Vol. 12, no. 4, p. 270-287 (2005)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/39727