Relationship Of The Social Sharing Of Emotions And Emotional Recovery And Its Influencing Factors

The Social Sharing of Emotion is a common phenomenon in daily life. It entails a description of the emotional event by the person who experienced it to some addressee, in a socially shared language. Emotion recovery refers to the changes of emotion between the original emotion intensity and the emotion intensity when recalling the emotion event. It's believed that emotion recovery can benefit from emotion sharing. However, this hypothesis has not been confirmed by previous researches. The present study attempts to examine the relations between these two factors and the effects.The study investigated 58 volunteers, all of whom are undergraduates and graduates, using experiment to explore the relation between social sharing of emotion and emotion recovery, as well as the influence of the valence of emotion and gender. The results suggested:(1) The type of social sharing has a significant effect on negative emotion recovery. The social sharing which has no relation with the emotional event is more helpful for the short-time recovery of negative emotion than the emotion sharing. The type of sharing has no effect on the positive emotion recovery. In this study, gender has no effect on both valences of emotion.(2) Skin Conductance Level and Respiration Rate are sensitive indexes for the change of emotion. The type of social sharing, the valence of emotion and gender has no difference for the change of Skin Conductance Level. For the Respiration Rate, the valence of emotion and the type of sharing have interaction on emotion recovery on different stages. The social sharing which has no relation with the emotional event made the Respiration Rate down for the positive emotion, and up for the negative emotion.