The Effects of Story-Telling on Emotional Experience: An Experimental Paradigm

Telling about emotionally significant events is a basic activity in human relationships and plays an integral role in the process of psychotherapy, in film and literature, and in other contexts where emotional experiences are shared using language. Bringing events and images to mind activates feelings anew; talking about them may further activate and perhaps alter the experiences as registered in the speaker’s memory. We review the results of five studies where participants were asked to bring an emotionally significant event to mind and report how they felt at the time (time 1); report how they feel now in the moment of thinking about it (time 2); tell about the event, and report how they felt after telling (time 3). Overall, we see a pattern whereby participants’ ratings of emotional intensity are high at time 1, lower at time 2 and high again at time 3. Most participants reported some change in the characterization of their emotions after describing the event, e.g. angry to neutral, and a smaller proportion reported more marked changes e.g. happy to sad. Language style indicating the presence of a referential process was shown to be moderately related to change in characterization of emotion in two of the three studies in which language measures were applied. In combination the studies suggest that change in emotional characterization comes about in the context of the referential process associated with an increase in reflection. Revisions of the paradigm in future research are discussed.