Motives for the Acceptance of the Social Sharing of Positive and Negative Emotions and Perceived Motives of the Narrator for Sharing the Emotional Episode

By: RIPS - IRSP Blog on 6:54 AM

       People tend to feel the need to talk about their emotional experiences. This phenomenon is called the Social Sharing of Emotion. A research note recently published in International Review of Social Psychology offers a new perspective on social sharing of emotions by focusing not only on people who shared emotional experiences but also on those who listened, and in particular by trying to understand what may lead someone to accept the social sharing of emotion. In most cases, the narrator perceived the social sharing of his emotions as useful and beneficial (see Rimé, 2007). However, what about the listener? The study recently published in the IRSP originally investigates (1) why people listen and (2) what are their perceptions of the narrator’s motives.

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After recovering a recent situation in which participants listened someone’s emotional (positive or negative) episode, they were asked to list reasons (1) why they accepted the social sharing and (2) why they perceived that the narrator needed to speak with them. Results show that the acceptance of social sharing is principally predicted by the need to afford social support and preserve social relationship. However, depending on the valence of the emotional experiences (i.e., sharing of positive or negative emotions), different motives emerged. Indeed, for positive events, the categories bonding, empathy and information (i.e., being informed about what had occurred during the event) were the main reported motives. For negative events, the categories of emotional support and social support were the most frequently reported. The perceived motives for narrator’s sharing are mainly venting and bonding with the listener and did not differ on the whole for positive or negative events.

     Thus, this research provides new information about the operation of social interactions during social sharing of emotion. Indeed, according to the authors, people listen principally to reinforce relationship and to provide support in view of the perceived narrator’s needs to comfort, express emotion and avoid loneliness.

References :

Delelis, G. & Christophe, V., (2016). Motives for the Acceptance of the Social Sharing of Positive and Negative Emotions and Perceived Motives of the Narrator for Sharing the Emotional Episode. International Review of Social Psychology. 29(1), pp.99–104. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.4

Rimé, B. (2007). Interpersonal emotion regulation In: Gross, J. J. ed.  Handbook of emotion regulation. NY: Guilford Press, pp. 466–485.

Download the article of Delelis & Christophe from the link:

                                            http://www.rips-irsp.com/article/10.5334/irsp.4/

About the Charlies in the streets

By: RIPS - IRSP Blog on 5:12 AM

From the special collection of the International Review of Social Psychology on the social and political psychology of terrorism

Many tags as “We are Charlie”, “Never again”, “Freedom of speech”, “All united” could be read during the gathering of 4 million people all over France to mark the horror of January’s terrorist attacks—on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Paris Hyper Casher supermarket—that left 17 people dead. It was the largest French demonstration of national unity since World War II.
Soon, however, some doubts about the ‘real’ motivations of the Charlies in the streets began to emerge. Were they “good citizens" marching again racism, defending tolerance, and republican values? Or, were they rather implicitly demonstrating their rejection of Islam and Muslims, as suggested by the demographer Emmanuel Todd (2015)?

In his book “Who is Charlie? Sociology of a Religious Crisis”, Emmanuel Todd (2015) argued that the rallies were not what they appeared to be. Far from corresponding to the image of people standing together conveyed by the media, Todd thinks that the deeper motivations of the Charlies in the streets were islamophobic—although they publicly displayed antiracist attitudes. His massively contested and controversial book instantly became a bestseller, with more than 60 000 copies sold worldwide.

A special collection on the social and political psychology of terrorism was recently published in the International Review of Social Psychology (IRSP), with two articles focusing on what drove Charlie Hebdo’s marchers.

The Charlie Hebdo marchers explicitly displayed egalitarian values

The article of Nonna Mayer and Vincent Tiberj (“Who were the « Charlie » in the streets? A socio-political approach of the January 11 rallies”) analyzed the socio-cultural, political, and ideological profile of the participants to the Charlie rallies through a large national survey. The research was conducted between March, 3 and 11, 2015, on a representative sample of 1040 French people. The results showed that those who participated in the rallies were mostly young, urban, educated, and leftwing citizens—which does not reflect the MAZ bloc (“Middle class, Aged and Zombies”; i.e., culturally catholic) described by Todd. The most inclined to join the Charlie Hebdo rallies were those with the lowest declared scores of islamophobia and xenophobia. In other words, those who had negative explicit attitudes toward Muslims and Islam participated less than those who had not.

There was no dissociation between implicit and explicit

In the same vein, Oulmann Zerhouni, Marine Rougier, and Dominique Muller (“"Who (really) is Charlie?" French cities with lower implicit prejudice toward Arabs demonstrated larger participation rates in Charlie Hebdo rallies ») questioned Todd’s assumption about the deeper motivations of the Charlie Hebdo’s marchers. Indeed, Todd’s hypothesis leads one to think that even if those marchers would publicly display antiracist attitudes, they were ultimately driven by islamophobic implicit attitudes (i.e., that were not part of their conscious experience), deriving from the Catholic background of the cities involved. Through the use of data on the French/Arab Implicit Association Test (IAT)—able to reveal subtle or implicit level of prejudice toward an outgroup—they tested whether implicit prejudice, measured at a city-level, could predict the participation rate observed in these same French cities. Their results showed that cities implicitly biased against Arabs (as compared with French) participated less, and not more, to the rallies. Importantly, highly culturally catholic cities did not provide higher IAT scores compared to cities with less or small Catholic background, which means that the larger participation observed in these cities cannot be attributed to anti-Arab prejudice.

In sum, in contrast to Todd’s claim, these two studies showed that those who participated to the rallies publicly displayed egalitarian values on the one hand, and that the cities who participated the most to the rallies showed less implicit xenophobic attitudes, not more, on the other hand. Thus, it seems that Todd’s argument about the “unconscious” drive deriving from historical and religious traditions of the people who joined the rallies is, one more time, being challenged.

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References 

Mayer, N., & Tiberj, V. (2016). Who were the «Charlie» in the Streets? A Socio-Political Approach of the January 11 Rallies [Qui étaient Les “Charlie” dans la rue? Approche Socio-Politique des Rassemblements du 11 Janvier]. International Review of Social Psychology, 29(1).

Todd, E. (2015). Who is Charlie? Sociology of a Religious Crisis [Qui est Charlie?: Sociologie d’une crise religieuse]. Paris: Seuil.

Zerhouni, O., Rougier, M., & Muller, D. (2016). “Who (Really) is Charlie?” French Cities with Lower Implicit Prejudice toward Arabs Demonstrated Larger Participation Rates in Charlie Hebdo Rallies [“Qui est (Vraiment) Charlie?” Les Villes Françaises à plus Faible niveau de Préjugés Implicites envers les Maghrébins ont davantage Participé aux rassemblements de Charlie Hebdo]. International Review of Social Psychology, 29(1).

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Read the summery of the special collection and download these (open-access) articles here: http://psysoc-bullhorn.blogspot.fr/2016/09/international-review-of-social.html#.V-puTjLpN1M

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