The Double-Edged Sword of Social Sharing: Social Sharing Predicts Increased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is Low but Decreased Emotion Differentiation When Rumination Is High.

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, we used data from four daily life studies (N = 659; student and community samples) to explore the association between social sharing and subsequent emotion differentiation, which involves labeling emotions with a high degree of complexity. Contrary to our expectations, we found that social sharing of emotional experiences was linked to greater subsequent emotion differentiation on occasions when people ruminated less than usual about these experiences. In contrast, on occasions when people ruminated more than usual about their experiences, social sharing of these experiences was linked to lower emotion differentiation. These effects held when we controlled for levels of negative emotion. Our findings suggest that putting feelings into words through sharing may only enable emotional precision when that sharing occurs without dwelling or perseverating.

The adaptiveness of fear (and other emotions) considered more broadly: Missed literature on the nature of emotions and its functions.

We agree with Grossmann that fear often builds cooperative relationships. Yet he neglects much extant literature. Prior researchers have discussed how fear (and other emotions) build cooperative relationships, have questioned whether fear per se evolved to serve this purpose, and have emphasized that human cooperation takes many forms. Grossmann's theory would benefit from a wider consideration of this work.

Who are "we" and why are we cooperating? Insights from social psychology.

Tomasello argues in the target article that a sense of moral obligation emerges from the creation of a collaborative "we" motivating us to fulfill our cooperative duties. We suggest that "we" takes many forms, entailing different obligations, depending on the type (and underlying functions) of the relationship(s) in question. We sketch a framework of such types, functions, and obligations to guide future research in our commentary.

The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?

Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations can also be intimidating and anxiety provoking, and this makes people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates? We found that following interactions, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company, an illusion we call the liking gap. We observed the liking gap as strangers got acquainted in the laboratory, as first-year college students got to know their dorm mates, and as formerly unacquainted members of the general public got to know each other during a personal development workshop. The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths and even lasted for several months, as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.

"Tears of joy" & "smiles of joy" prompt distinct patterns of interpersonal emotion regulation.

Close relationship partners often respond to happiness expressed through smiles with capitalization, i.e. they join in attempting to up-regulate and prolong the individual's positive emotion, and they often respond to crying with interpersonal down-regulation of negative emotions, attempting to dampen the negative emotions. We investigated how people responded when happiness was expressed through tears, an expression termed dimorphous. We hypothesised that the physical expression of crying would prompt interpersonal down-regulation of emotion when the onlooker perceived that the expresser was experiencing negative or positive emotions. When participants were asked how they would behave when faced with smiles of joy, we expected capitalization responses, and when faced with tears of joy, we expected down-regulation responses. In six experimental studies using video and photographic stimuli, we found support for our hypotheses. Throughout our investigations we test and discuss boundaries of and possible mechanisms for such responsiveness.

Willingness to express emotion depends upon perceiving partner care.

Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxiety to each partner. Individuals who generally perceive high communal strength from their partners were also generally most willing to express emotion to partners. Independently, participants were more willing to express emotion to particular partners whom they perceived felt more communal strength toward them. In Study 2, members of romantic couples independently reported their own felt communal strength toward one another, perceptions of their partners' felt communal strength toward them, and willingness to express emotions (happiness, sadness, anxiety, disgust, anger, hurt and guilt) to each other. The communal strength partners reported feeling toward the participants predicted the participants' willingness to express emotion to those partners. This link was mediated by participants' perceptions of the partner's communal strength toward them which, itself, was a joint function of accurate perceptions of the communal strength partners had reported feeling toward them and projections of their own felt communal strength for their partners onto those partners.

Dimorphous expressions of positive emotion: displays of both care and aggression in response to cute stimuli.

Extremely positive experiences, and positive appraisals thereof, produce intense positive emotions that often generate both positive expressions (e.g., smiles) and expressions normatively reserved for negative emotions (e.g., tears). We developed a definition of these dimorphous expressions and tested the proposal that their function is to regulate emotions. We showed that individuals who express emotions in this dimorphous manner do so as a general response across a variety of emotionally provoking situations, which suggests that these expressions are responses to intense positive emotion rather than unique to one particular situation. We used cute stimuli (an elicitor of positive emotion) to demonstrate both the existence of these dimorphous expressions and to provide preliminary evidence of their function as regulators of emotion.

Shared experiences are amplified.

In two studies, we found that sharing an experience with another person, without communicating, amplifies one's experience. Both pleasant and unpleasant experiences were more intense when shared. In Study 1, participants tasted pleasant chocolate. They judged the chocolate to be more likeable and flavorful when they tasted it at the same time that another person did than when that other person was present but engaged in a different activity. Although these results were consistent with our hypothesis that shared experiences are amplified compared with unshared experiences, it could also be the case that shared experiences are more enjoyable in general. We designed Study 2 to distinguish between these two explanations. In this study, participants tasted unpleasantly bitter chocolate and judged it to be less likeable when they tasted it simultaneously with another person than when that other person was present but doing something else. These results support the amplification hypothesis.

When emotion expression will (and will not) enhance listening and responsiveness.

We theorize that expressing emotion often will enhance listening and responsiveness in communal relationships because the nature of cooperation called for in communal relationships often matches five functions that expressing emotion can serve. The same is less frequently true for other types of relationships.

The development of a novel scale to assess intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies: The Emotion Regulation Strategy Scale (ERSS).

Existing emotion regulation research focuses on how individuals use different strategies to manage their own emotions-also called intra-personal emotion regulation. However, people often leverage connections with others to regulate their own emotions-interpersonal emotion regulation. The goal of the present studies was to develop a comprehensive and efficient scale-the Emotion Regulation Strategies Scale (ERSS)-to assess nine specific emotion regulation strategies that individuals use both intra-personally and interpersonally. These emotion regulation strategies were cognitive reappraisal, distraction, situation selection, problem solving, acceptance, calming, savoring, rumination, and expressive suppression. Data were collected between 2020 and 2022. Study 1 adopted a qualitative approach to establish original scale items. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis in Study 2 confirmed a nine-factor solution for both the intra- and the interpersonal scales and finalized scale items. A second confirmatory factor analysis in Study 3 found the ERSS for both the intra-personal and interpersonal scale models to possess good model fit. Correlations from Study 3 showed the ERSS subscales to be related in expected ways to existing emotion regulation scales, yet not redundant with these scales. The degree to which individuals used the range of intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies assessed on the ERSS also related to the levels of clinical symptoms. The ERSS represents a comprehensive novel scale that can flexibly assess a range of specific emotion regulation strategies used both intra- and interpersonally. Future work should be conducted using the ERSS cross culturally and in clinical samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).