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Do Both Misery and Happiness Love Company? the Emotional Consequences of Listening to Experiences Shared by Others

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Do Both Misery and Happiness Love Company? the Emotional Consequences of Listening to Experiences Shared by Others University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 12-2014 Do both misery and happiness love company? The emotional consequences of listening to experiences shared by others. Samantha Warchol University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Part of the Community Psychology Commons, and the Social Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Warchol, Samantha, "Do both misery and happiness love company? The emotional consequences of listening to experiences shared by others." (2014). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1797 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Emotional consequences of listening to others’ experiences 1 Do misery and happiness both love company? The emotional consequences of listening to experiences shared by others. Samantha Warchol The University of Tennessee- Knoxville Emotional consequences of listening to others’ experiences 2 Abstract Sharing personal experiences and events is an important component of developing personal relationships and connecting with others. Two adages present contradictory thoughts on how “friends” will respond to personal accomplishments or difficulties. The first claims, “When times get rough, you will find out who your real friends are”; the other claims, “Misery loves company”. This study focuses on how sharing information affects individual mood in order to understand how sharing a personal experience may affect relationships and listeners. Previous research has focused on how the speaker potentially benefits from sharing personal experiences with others. Instead, this study attempts to understand how the listener is affected emotionally by having an event shared with them; do people typically enjoy hearing about others’ happiness or do people relish in the misery of others? The “Personal Experiences Survey” functions as a preliminary measure that asks participants to first act as a “speaker” in sharing their own personal experience and then asks them to be a “listener” and read another individual’s personal experience. Participants’ moods are measured both after acting as the “speaker” and as the “listener” in order to detect overall mood changes. The participants with the greatest increase in positive mood were those who shared their own positive experience and then read a positive experience; participants also preferred listening to events congruent to their present mood. Overall, this study shows that individuals focus on their own experiences, minimizing the experiences of others unless they, as a listener, benefit. Keywords: disclosure, personal experience, capitalization, sharing events, congruent Emotional consequences of listening to others’ experiences 3 Introduction Sharing personal experiences and events is an important component of developing personal relationships and connecting with others. Two adages present contradictory thoughts on how “friends” will respond to personal accomplishments or difficulties. The first claims, “When times get rough, you will find out who your real friends are”; the other claims, “Misery loves company”. These contradictory situations pose the question of when to share information with others and how a listener is affected by an event told to them. Do people typically enjoy hearing about others’ happiness, or do people relish in the misery of others? Although this study cannot fully answer this question, it acts as a preliminary measure that examines how people are emotionally affected by the experiences of others. The effects of disclosing or sharing personal events has been widely studied in the area of Social Psychology, particularly in the context of traumatic experiences, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans. Although this research examines the effects of information sharing, it was not significantly used in the development of this particular study, because first, it focuses on the sharing of extreme news and experiences, and secondly, this area of study examines the effects on the speaker, such as the veteran, instead of the effects on the family member or friend who is listening to the experience being shared. More recent research focuses on the sharing of less extreme events, including what type of information is the most likely to be shared and the potential benefits of sharing for both the speaker and listener. Researchers like Heath (1996) have examined what type of news people prefer to share based on personal relevance, the source of the news and the conditions of the environment. Studies such as this have been a foundation for understanding how and why information is shared. In his series of studies, Heath asked participants to select which “facts” or events they Emotional consequences of listening to others’ experiences 4 would be most likely to share. These surveys contained a variety of positive, negative, extreme and mild “facts” or events from reliable sources. After his series of surveys, Heath developed the congruence hypothesis , which first states that individuals are the most likely to share information that is personally relevant to them. Secondly, it suggests that individuals are likely to share information that is congruent with the overall mood or environment. For example, in an already negative environment people responded that they were much more likely to share bad news; however, when the environment was positive, participants were more likely to share something positive. Finally, Heath affirmed that moderate news was the most likely to be shared, since people viewed it as more reliable. This final portion of his analysis is particularly relevant to this study because it focuses on the sharing of moderate news, which occurs the most often. Heath’s congruence hypothesis was used as a foundation for developing my hypotheses and survey. Studies have also been conducted on the sharing of positive events and how speakers attempt to capitalize on their happiness from an event by receiving a positive reaction from a listener (Gable, Reis, Impett & Asher, 2004). Related studies asked participants to write about an event from their day, whether or not they shared this event with someone close to them and the reaction they received from the person with whom they shared their event (Gable, Gonzaga & Strachman, 2006). Gable’s studies analyzed how different types of reactions, such as positive or negative and constructive or passive, influenced how the listener benefited emotionally from the event and how the relationship between listener and speaker may have been affected. In 2013, Dr. Hackenbracht and Dr. Gasper attempted to further understand the motives of a listener, through the belongingness hypothesis . This hypothesis argues that a listener benefits from a speaker’s emotional disclosure through an increase in the positive relationship between the two individuals, provoking an increased sense of belonging on the part of the listener. Similar to Dr. Emotional consequences of listening to others’ experiences 5 Hackenbracht and Gasper’s research, the focus of this paper is on the effects of the listener, who is receiving either a positive or negative personal experience from an unknown individual. In the “Personal Experiences Survey”, the need to belong and the benefits of sharing for the speaker are not primary variables, since participants are reading responses written by an unknown individual. The only information that participants are given is that the “speaker” is another student at their university. There was no manipulation of exclusion on the part of the listener; however, the belongingness hypothesis provides a framework for how participants may be emotionally affected by both sharing and then listening to negative experiences in particular. This study utilizes previous research on how listeners benefit from disclosure and the sharing of personal events. The “Personal Experiences Survey” is a preliminary examination of how individuals will be emotionally affected by the everyday personal experiences of an unknown individual. The importance of personal experiences are defined in the survey. Positive personal experiences were explained to be: “Personal experiences often provoke an increase of mood, a stronger sense of being connected to others, increased self-worth and achievement for an individual. These experiences can be more generally defined by experiences that are not related to work or education and that provoke positive feelings. Personal experiences may be smaller experiences that happen in a day or month...” Negative personal experiences were described in the same manner except in that they provoke negative feelings, including a weakened sense of being connected to other and potentially decreased self-worth. Based on previous research, I first hypothesize that participants will be positively affected as a listener when they have shared a positive personal event, regardless of whether or not they read a positive event. Secondly, I predict there will be a noticeable
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