The Social Sharing of Emotion in Interpersonal and in Collective Situations

Emotion very generally elicits a process of social sharing of emotional experience. Field studies and experimental research indeed showed that after an emotional episode, there is a systematic increase in the degree to which people talk about their experience. As listeners are emotionally affected by what they heard, they thereafter share it with members of their own network, who in turn manifest the same inclination. In this manner, a serial reproduction of the sharing process develops with a collective propagation of what initially affected only a single member of the community. When members of a community are collectively exposed to a same emotion-eliciting event or news, most of them then talk about the event with people around abundantly. In doing so, involved people mutually exacerbate their emotions and favor states of emotional communion. The widespread use of on-line interaction media feeds such processes ever more. In this chapter, we will examine the social and individual consequences of such conditions as well as the variables accounting for their initiation and termination. We will also examine the emotional and social consequences of collective celebrations in which collective events such as loss, victory, defeat, success, failure, catastrophe, accident, common threat, are commemorated in large crowds or are broadcasted at a national or even planetary level. Finally, we will conclude by sketching the promising of perspectives offered by a study of the social sharing of emotions in cyberspace.