| Description |
Humans relate to each other through shared stories of past experiences. Telling stories about emotionally charged memories gives the narrator an avenue through which to process the event and the emotions they felt as it happened. Previous research suggests that this narrative experience may lead to lower levels of the primary emotion associated with the event. However, most experiences involve more than one emotion. This study investigates how narrating anger changes secondary emotions (fear and sadness) in both intensity (how strongly the emotion is felt) and quality (from one dominant emotion to another), as well as age differences on both of these fronts. Adolescents (ages 8-17, N = 118) were asked to think of a recent event in their life in which they felt angry at another person, to narrate their memory to a trained research assistant, and complete ratings about their anger and additional emotions. We hypothesize that as the intensity of anger decreases throughout the study and narrations, the intensity of fear and sadness will increase, and that anger will change qualitatively into fear or sadness. We also predict that these changes will be greater among participants in late adolescence than those in early adolescence. Support for our first hypothesis was not found within the data. However, the data do indicate that decreasing anger makes room for sadness and fear to become the predominant emotions, even if their intensity is unchanging. |
