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Furthermore, people turn to their social environment to search for clarification when faced with obscure or confusing environmental situations or sensations. In 1954 Leon Festinger, a well known social psychologist, presented his influential social comparison theory, which proposes that people seek to obtain accurate self-evaluations by comparing themselves to similar others. Riger also suggests that this individualistic view of emotional regulation could have been influenced by the context within which it had been studied, i.e. In the field of psychology a healthy individual is typically seen as “self-contained, independent and self-reliant, capable of asserting himself and influencing his environment”. Rimé also later pointed out that attachment theory rendered emotional regulation to be of an interpersonal nature for children, yet to become mature adults one must become autonomous and capable of regulating emotions independently. As such, emotions were generally regarded as ephemeral and intrapersonal experiences. noted that in contemporary scientific research, emotions were considered to be responses to preceding events that are then restrained by self-control and self-restoration. Therefore, the studies concerning the social sharing of emotions contribute a substantial new perspective to the understanding of emotions and their underlying processes.īackground Context (historic view of emotion) Yet, the first set of experiments revealed that 88–96% of emotional experiences are shared and discussed to some degree. This research was a significant development in social psychology because it questioned the accepted view of emotions-that emotions are short-lived and intrapersonal episodes-that was prevalent in the literature. coined the term “social sharing of emotions” in 1991 to name the observed phenomenon. At the onset of these empirical studies, Rimé et al. Scientific studies of catastrophes and important life events demonstrate the propensity of victims to talk about their experiences and express their emotions. According to this area of research, emotional experiences are not uniquely fleeting and internal. The social sharing of emotions is a phenomenon in the field of psychology that concerns the tendency to recount and share emotional experiences with others.