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The Social Sharing of Emotion in Interpersonal and in Collective Situations

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Cyberemotions

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mesquita, B.: Cultural variations in emotion: a comparative study of Dutch, Surinamese and Turkish people in the Netherlands, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1993)

  2. 2.

    Rimé, B., Yogo, M., Pennebaker, J.W.: [Social sharing of emotion across cultures]. Unpublished Raw Data (1996b)

  3. 3.

    Zech, E.: La gestion du deuil et la gestion des émotions [Coping with grief and coping with emotions]. Unpublished Master Thesis, University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (1994)

  4. 4.

    Zech, E.: The effects of the communication of emotional experiences. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2000)

  5. 5.

    Christophe, V.: Le partage social des émotions du point de vue de l’auditeur [Social sharing of emotion on the side of the target]. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Université de Lille III, France (1997)

  6. 6.

    Christophe, V.: Le partage social des émotions du point de vue de l’auditeur [Social sharing of emotion on the side of the target]. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Université de Lille III, France (1997)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Bernard Rimé

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  1. Bernard Rimé
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Correspondence to Bernard Rimé .

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  1. Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Janusz A. Holyst

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Rimé, B. (2017). The Social Sharing of Emotion in Interpersonal and in Collective Situations. In: Holyst, J. (eds) Cyberemotions. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43639-5_4

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