CULTURAL VARIATIONS IN SOCIAL SHARING OF EMOTIONS An Intercultural Perspective

Prior research has established that the " social sharing " of emotions is an integral part of an emotional experience. Whereas earlier studies have focused on universal features of sharing (e.g., rate, frequency, delay), this study investigates social and relational aspects of sharing hypothesized to be more open to cultural variation. A total of 555 adolescents from the Indian, immigrant Indian, and the English culture recalled episodes of fear, shame, and sadness, and answered questions related to the sharing of these experiences. Results revealed that each of these emotions is associated with sharing patterns that are unique to them. The cross-cultural differences in sharing evidenced related to a greater importance and implication of the ingroup in the emotional lives of adolescents in the Indian and immigrant Indian adolescent groups, as compared to the English adolescents. Social sharing is the term used to describe the process during which a person, having experienced an emotion, recounts this experience to his or her social environment. The process essentially entails the transmission of information and experience of a personal and emotional nature, from the person experiencing the emotion to his or her sociocultural environment. defines social sharing as having two prerequisites, (a) the reevocation of an emotion in a socially shared language, and (b) at least at the symbolic level, an addressee. For some time, there has been considerable evidence to show that a major negative emotional experience (earthquake, war, loss of spouse/child, etc.) often comes with social sharing (e. More recently, several studies have shown that social sharing is in fact associated with most emotional experiences, both positive and negative, and that it is present in a number of The current study carries the investigation into social sharing a few steps further in two ways. First, it extends the range of social sharing variables examined by going beyond the commonly used measures of rate, delay, and frequency to examine the relational and social aspects of the sharing process. Second, it explores the process of social sharing from a cross-cultural perspective, in view of the fact that most of the existing data in this field are from respondents in Western European countries. Emotion has often been described as a multicomponent (e.g., Scherer, 1984) or a multi-faceted phenomena (e.g., Frijda, 1986). More recently, research carried out by Rimé and his colleagues has established social sharing to be an important part of the subjective component of …