Bi-Directional Associations Between Social Sharing and Emotion Differentiation in Everyday Life

Laypeople believe that sharing their emotional experiences with others will improve their understanding of those experiences, but no clear empirical evidence supports this belief. To address this gap, using data from four well-powered daily life studies (Ntotal = 659), we explored possible effects of social sharing on subsequent emotion differentiation (labelling emotions with a high degree of complexity) and vice versa. We found evidence that when people experienced specific, stressful negative events and did not ruminate about them, social sharing was linked to greater subsequent emotion differentiation. In contrast, when people experienced such events and ruminated about them, social sharing was linked to lower emotion differentiation. Additionally, lower emotion differentiation was linked to greater subsequent social sharing, suggesting that understanding one’s emotions may pre-empt sharing them with others.