Crying, talking and sharing: when emotional expression helps

The folk theory of release

Few beliefs about emotion are as widespread as the idea that a good cry, or getting something off one’s chest, brings relief. The belief is a direct descendant of the hydraulic model described in Research note 01: emotion accumulates and must be discharged. Research on crying and on talking about emotional experiences allows that belief to be examined directly, and the results are more interesting than a simple yes or no.

Crying: retrospective benefit, immediate cost

Bylsma, Vingerhoets and Rottenberg (2008) analysed reports from several thousand participants across many countries who described their most recent crying episode. Most people reported that their mood improved after crying, but a substantial proportion reported no change, and some reported feeling worse. Benefit depended on the circumstances. Participants were more likely to report improvement when they received social support while crying and when the episode led to a resolution or a new understanding of the event that triggered it. They were less likely to benefit when they felt ashamed of crying or when the crying was accompanied by symptoms of mood disorder.

Laboratory research tells a different story in the short term. In studies where participants watch sad films, mood is often worse immediately after crying than in participants who did not cry. Gračanin, Bylsma and Vingerhoets (2014) reviewed this apparent contradiction and proposed that crying may act as a self-soothing behaviour whose calming effects, possibly mediated by parasympathetic activation, emerge with a delay, and that much of its benefit comes from the social responses it elicits. Retrospective reports may also be shaped by how the episode ended rather than by its average course.

The conclusion is not that crying is useless. It is that crying is not an automatic valve. Its effects depend on what happens around it and whether the situation that caused it changes.

Sharing emotion with others

Rimé (2009) reviewed a long research programme on the social sharing of emotion. Across ages, cultures and types of emotion, people talk about the large majority of their emotional experiences with others, usually within hours or days and often repeatedly. More intense emotions are shared more often.

Sharing has clear social functions. It elicits attention, empathy and support, and it strengthens the relationship between the person who shares and the person who listens. People also believe that sharing helps them recover. Experimental work, however, separates the perceived benefit from the measured one. In the studies reported by Zech and Rimé (2005), participants who talked about a negative emotional experience rated the conversation as helpful, yet the emotional impact of the memory, measured later, was not reduced compared with participants who did not talk about it. What did appear to matter was whether the conversation supported cognitive work on the experience, such as reappraisal and meaning-making, rather than a re-expression of the emotion alone.

This mirrors the evidence on expressive writing. Benefits have been linked to changes in how people construct an account of the experience over time, not to the intensity of emotion expressed in any single session (Pennebaker, 1997).

Naming a feeling

Lieberman and colleagues (2007) showed participants photographs of emotional facial expressions and asked them either to choose a word describing the emotion, to choose a name matching the person’s gender, or simply to look. Labelling the emotion was associated with reduced activity in the amygdala compared with the other conditions and with increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; the two effects were inversely related. The authors interpret affect labelling as a form of implicit emotion regulation.

The study used standardised images rather than personal experiences, so it cannot show how labelling affects recovery from real events. It does illustrate a mechanism through which putting feelings into words can change their course without any discharge at all.

What this means for catharsis

Taken together, these findings suggest a revision of the folk theory. Emotional expression tends to help when it brings in one or more of three things: support from other people, understanding of what happened and what it means, or regulation through processes such as labelling and reappraisal. Expression that consists only of re-experiencing the emotion, without any of these, produces a sense of release more reliably than it produces recovery.

For the artifact this is a useful refinement. A crowd supplies support of a kind: shared rhythm, closeness and a sense of belonging (Research note 03). What it rarely supplies is understanding of the specific situation a person brought with them. That part usually happens elsewhere, in conversation, in writing, or in treatment.