ABSTRACT
Talking about an emotional experience is a well-known and common consequence of exposure to very intense negative emotional conditions. As early as 1910, William James, after witnessing the San Francisco earthquake, wrote to Pierre Janet about the victims’ apparent need to talk about their experiences. At night, he noted, it was impossible to sleep in the tents which served as temporary housing for the earthquake victims, due to the continuous verbal exchanges (Janet, 1926/1975, p. 326). This early anecdotal observation was confirmed in surveys conducted on San Francisco residents after the Loma Prieta Earthquake. Pennebaker and Harber (1993) recorded that one week after this earthquake, the average person still thought and talked about it nine times per day. Similarly, one week after the beginning of the Persian Gulf War, these authors observed that the average Dallas residents thought and talked about the war 12 times daily. According to Janoff-Bulman (1992, p. 108), people who are exposed to strong negative emotional circumstances experience a seemingly insatiable need to tell others about their experience, as if they felt coerced into talking. Data from numerous sources document the pervasiveness of this phenomenon. The need to talk about their experience was mentioned by 88 percent of rescuers operating in a North Sea oil platform disaster (Ersland et al., 1989), by 88 percent of people who had recently lost a relative (Schoenberg et al., 1975), and by 86 percent of patients with a recent diagnosis of cancer (Mitchell & Glickman, 1977). In sum, there is strong evidence that exposure to a major negative emotional event elicits a need to be with others and to talk about it.
