by Ethan Kross
After the tragedy, the community held public vigils, but many students chose to express their feelings online, posting on Facebook and memorial websites and using chat messaging programs to talk about what had happened.
One hundred and seventy miles south of DeKalb, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the psychologists Amanda Vicary and R. Chris Fraley saw the Northern Illinois tragedy as a heartbreaking but valuable opportunity to further a line of research they were already pursuing to better understand grief and emotional sharing in real time. In science we sometimes need to look at the most painful experiences people endure to learn something valuable about how to help people navigate such events. To do so takes both delicacy and compassion, as well as commitment to the scientific method and its potential to yield insights that benefit the greater good. This was the task that Vicary and Fraley set themselves to in the aftermath of the shooting in DeKalb.
They started by emailing a large number of students from Northern Illinois to participate in a study to track how they were coping. Ten months earlier, a gunman had gone on an even more destructive rampage at Virginia Tech, killing thirty-two people and similarly leaving behind a grief-stricken community. Vicary and Fraley had also reached out to a group of Virginia Tech students shortly after that attack. Now they had two samples to pool together to get a picture of how the survivors recovered from the resulting welter of emotions.
Two weeks after the shootings, roughly three-quarters of the students in the two samples displayed symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress. This was to be expected. Most of them were grappling with the most disturbing experience of their lives. Tragedies of the sort that the students had gone through in both Illinois and Virginia challenge a person’s worldview. When that happens, some people try to avoid focusing on their traumatic memories to blunt the pain. But others actively try to make sense of their feelings, and a principal way of doing so is by communicating with others, which is what the students did. Eighty-nine percent of them joined a Facebook group to talk and read about what happened. Seventy-eight percent, meanwhile, chatted online about it, and 74 percent texted about it using their cellphones.
Most of the students found this way of releasing their chatter comforting. It allowed them to express their thoughts and feelings with others who were dealing with a similar experience, which can be a valuable form of normalization. As one Virginia Tech student said, “When I have a bout of loneliness, I can log on to Facebook or send someone an IM and I’ll feel just a little more connected to people.”
None of this was particularly surprising. As we already know, people are naturally disposed to sharing their thoughts with others when they are struggling with chatter, and social media and other forms of virtual connectivity provide convenient avenues for doing so. What was surprising was what Vicary and Fraley discovered when the study ended two months after the shootings.
While the students at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University thought that expressing their emotions to others made them feel better, the degree to which they shared their emotions didn’t actually influence their depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms.
All that emoting, writing, connecting, and remembering—it hadn’t been beneficial.
From Aristotle to Freud
The same year that the Northern Illinois massacre occurred, a related study was published that examined the emotional resiliency of a nationally representative sample of people living in the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The researchers examined whether more than two thousand people living across the country chose to express their feelings about 9/11 during the ten days following the fall of the Twin Towers. Then they tracked the participants’ physical and mental health over the next two years. The terrain of human behavior they were looking at was complicated, but their question was simple: Does sharing emotions impact how we feel over time?
What they found was remarkably consistent with what Vicary and Fraley discovered.
The people who shared their thoughts and feelings about 9/11 right after it happened didn’t feel better. In fact, on the whole, they fared worse than the people in the study who didn’t open up about how they felt. They experienced more chatter and engaged in more avoidant coping. Moreover, among those who did choose to express their feelings, the people who shared the most had the highest levels of general distress and worst physical health.
Once again, sharing emotions didn’t help. In this case, it hurt.
Of course, both the college shootings and 9/11 were rare acts of extraordinary violence, which might lead you to think that sharing emotions with others is only unhelpful in the wake of tragic events. That brings us back to the work of the Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé.
Recall the fundamental pattern in human behavior that Rimé uncovered. When people are upset, they are strongly driven to share their feelings with others; emotions act like jet fuel that propels us to talk to other people about the thoughts and feelings streaming through our heads. But alongside this discovery, he uncovered something equally important—and certainly more surprising—which confirms that these studies on the emotional fallout of major tragedies aren’t isolated cases.
In study after study, Rimé found that talking to others about our negative experiences doesn’t help us recover in any meaningful way. Sure, sharing our emotions with others makes us feel closer to and more supported by the people we open up to. But the ways most of us commonly talk and listen to each other do little to reduce our chatter. Quite frequently, they exacerbate it.
Rimé’s finding, along with many others, clashes dramatically with conventional wisdom. Talking, we are often told by popular culture, makes you feel better. Much self-help literature tells us this, as do many of the people around us. We hear that venting our emotions is healthy and supporting others is indispensable. It’s not that simple, though there are reasons it might seem that it is.
The idea that talking about negative emotions with others is good for us isn’t a recent development. It has been a part of Western culture for more than two thousand years. One of the earliest proponents of this approach was Aristotle, who suggested that people need to purge themselves of their emotions after watching a tragic event, a process he called catharsis. But this practice didn’t really gain traction more broadly until two millennia later. As modern psychology was bursting to life in Europe in the late 1890s, Sigmund Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer picked up Aristotle’s thread and argued that the path to a sound mind required people to bring the dark pain of their inner lives into the light. You can think of this as the hydraulic model of emotion: Strong feelings need to be released like the steam escaping from a boiling kettle.
While these cultural trappings urge us from a young age to talk to others about our feelings, the underlying drive to air our inner voice is actually implanted in our minds at an even earlier stage of our development—when we are drooling, screaming babies.
As newborns, helpless to care for ourselves or manage our emotions, we signal our distress to our caretakers, usually by wailing like little banshees (or at least my daughters did). After we get our needs met and the feeling of threat passes, our physiological arousal levels return to normal. Engaging in this process establishes an attachment to the caretaker, who often talks to the baby even before the infant can understand words.
Over time, our rapidly developing brains acquire language and soak up what our caregivers tell us about cause and effect, how to remedy our problems and deal with our emotions. This not only provides us with useful information for managing how we feel; it also provides us with the storytelling tools we need to talk to others about our experiences. This is one explanation for why communication is so entwined with chatter and why chatter is so entwined with seeking out other people.
Fortunately, there is a reason why the support we get from others so often backfires and a way to ci
rcumvent this phenomenon. Other people can be an invaluable tool for helping us subdue our chatter, and we can likewise help others with theirs. But as with any tool, to benefit from it we need to know how to properly use it, and in the case of giving and receiving support, that knowledge begins with understanding two basic needs that all humans have.
The Co-rumination Trap
When we’re upset and feel vulnerable or hurt or overwhelmed, we want to vent our emotions and feel consoled, validated, and understood. This provides an immediate sense of security and connection and feeds the basic need we have to belong. As a result, the first thing we usually seek out in others when our inner voice gets swamped in negativity is a fulfillment of our emotional needs.
We often think of fight or flight as the main defensive reaction human beings turn to when faced with a threat. When under stress, we flee or hunker down for the impending battle. While this reaction does characterize a pervasive human tendency, researchers have documented another stress-response system that many people engage in when under threat: a “tend and befriend” response. They seek out other people for support and care.
From an evolutionary perspective, the value of this approach comes from the fact that two people are more likely to ward off a predator than one; banding together during times of need can have a concrete advantage. Supporting this idea, research indicates that affiliating with others while under stress provides us with a sense of security and connection. It triggers a cascade of stress-attenuating biochemical reactions—involving naturally produced opioids as well as oxytocin, the so-called cuddle hormone—and feeds the basic need humans have to belong. And of course, a principal way we do this is by talking. Through active listening and displays of empathy, those who counsel us on our chatter can address these needs. Satisfying them can feel good in the moment, offering one sort of relief. But this is just one-half of the equation. That is because we also need to satisfy our cognitive needs.
When we’re dealing with chatter, we confront a riddle that demands solving. Inhibited by our inner voice run amok, we at times need outside help to work through the problem at hand, see the bigger picture, and decide on the most constructive course of action. All of this can’t be addressed solely by the caring presence and listening ear of a supportive person. We often need others to help us distance, normalize, and change the way we’re thinking about the experiences we’re going through. By doing so, we allow our emotions to cool down, pulling us out of dead-end rumination and aiding us in redirecting our verbal stream.
Yet this is why talking about emotions so often backfires, in spite of its enormous potential to help. When our minds are bathed in chatter, we display a strong bias toward satisfying our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. In other words, when we’re upset, we tend to overfocus on receiving empathy rather than finding practical solutions.
This dilemma is compounded by a commensurate problem on the helper side of the equation: The people we seek out for help respond in kind, prioritizing our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. They see our pain and first and foremost strive to provide us with love and validation. This is natural, a gesture of caring, and sometimes even useful in the short term. But even if we do signal that we want more cognitive assistance, research demonstrates that our interlocutors tend to miss these cues. One set of experiments demonstrated that even when support providers are explicitly asked to provide advice to address cognitive needs, they still believe it is more important to address people’s emotional needs. And it turns out that our attempts to satisfy those emotional needs often end up backfiring in ways that lead our friends to feel worse.
Here’s how talking goes wrong.
To demonstrate that they are there to offer emotional support, people are usually motivated to find out exactly what happened to upset us—the who-what-when-where-why of the problem. They ask us to relate what we felt and tell them in detail what occurred. And though they may nod and communicate empathy when we narrate what happened, this commonly results in leading us to relive the very feelings and experiences that have driven us to seek out support in the first place, a phenomenon called co-rumination.
Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions. A vicious cycle ensues, one that is all too easy to get sucked into, especially because it is driven by good intentions.
In practice, co-rumination amounts to tossing fresh logs onto the fire of an already flaming inner voice. The rehashing of the narrative revives the unpleasantness and keeps us brooding. While we feel more connected and supported by those who engage us this way, it doesn’t help us generate a plan or creatively reframe the problem at hand. Instead, it fuels our negative emotions and biological threat response.
Harmful co-ruminative dynamics emerge out of otherwise healthy, supportive relationships because our emotional, inner-voice mechanics aren’t actually like a hydraulic system, as Freud and Aristotle and conventional wisdom suggest. Letting out steam doesn’t relieve the pressure buildup inside. This is because when it comes to our inner voice, the game of dominoes provides a more appropriate metaphor.
When we focus on a negative aspect of our experience, that tends to activate a related negative thought, which activates another negative thought, and another, and so on. These dominoes continue to hit one another in a game where there is a potentially infinite supply of tiles. That is because our memories of emotional experiences are governed by principles of associationism, which means that related concepts are linked together in our mind.
To illustrate this idea, take a moment to imagine a cat. When you read the word “cat,” you probably thought of cats you have known or seen, or actually pictured them in your mind. But you also had thoughts and images of purring sounds, soft fur, and, if you’re allergic like me, bouts of sneezing. Now take this associative neural dominoing and apply it to the realm of talking about our emotions. It means that when our friends and loved ones ask us to recount our troubles in detail, related negative thoughts, beliefs, and experiences also spring to mind, which reactivate how bad we feel.
The associative nature of memory, combined with the bias we have to prioritize emotional needs over cognitive ones when we’re upset, is why talking often fails to lift our troubled internal dialogues into a more tranquil state. This is one possible explanation for why the Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech students who actively shared their thoughts and feelings about the shootings with other people didn’t get any measurable long-term benefit from doing so. And it’s why people in the national survey after 9/11 who shared their feelings may have ended up suffering from more physical and mental ills. All of which, of course, raises an urgent question: What’s the solution to co-rumination making us feel worse?
Kirk or Spock?
The common shorthand in psychology circles for the tension between emotion and cognition—between what we feel and what we think—is to use the Star Trek characters of Captain Kirk and Officer Spock. Kirk is all heart, a man of intense and compelling emotions. He’s fire. By contrast, Spock, that lovable, pointy-eared half human half Vulcan, is all head; he’s a cerebral problem solver unencumbered by the distractions of feelings. He’s ice.
The key to avoid rumination is to combine the two Starship Enterprise crew members. When supporting others, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock.
The most effective verbal exchanges are those that integrate both the social and the cognitive needs of the person seeking support. The interlocutor ideally acknowledges the person’s feelings and reflections, but then helps her put the situation in perspective. The advantage of such approaches is that you’re able to make people who are upset feel validated and connected, yet you can then pivot to providing them with the kind of big-picture advice that you,
as someone who is not immersed in their chatter, are uniquely equipped to provide. Indeed, the latter task is critical for helping people harness their inner voice in ways that lead them to experience less chatter over time.
Time, of course, plays a role in our ability to offer perspective-broadening support to the people in our lives. Studies consistently show that people prefer to not cognitively reframe their feelings during the very height of an emotional experience when emotions are worked up; they choose to engage in more intellectual forms of interventions later on. This is where a certain art in talking to other people comes into play, because you must walk a tightrope to take upset people from addressing their emotional needs to the more practical cognitive ones.
As it turns out, one version of this balancing act was codified decades ago by the New York Police Department Hostage Negotiations Team, which emerged in the early 1970s after a series of disastrous situations not just in New York City but also worldwide. To name just a few: the 1971 Attica prison riot, the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, and the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery featured in the film Dog Day Afternoon. A police officer and clinical psychologist named Harvey Schlossberg was tasked with creating the playbook for the new unit, whose unofficial motto became “Talk to me.” Along with prioritizing the need for compassionate engagement over the use of force, he stressed patience. Once the hostage takers understood that they weren’t in immediate danger, their autonomic threat response (presumably) eased. This reduced the negative frenzy of their inner voice, allowing the negotiator to shift the dialogue toward ending the standoff.