UC Santa Cruz

Emotion talk between friends was examined. Women, men, and mixed pairs engaged in an unstructured and self-disclosure conversation. In addition to comparing talk in the two topics, the speech act category, the directness, the experiencer, and the target of the emotion expression were analyzed. As expected, more references to emotion were made during the self-disclosure than during the unstructured conversation. Negative emotions were referenced more often than positive ones and were particularly likely to be referenced using an indirect form. Contrary to self-report studies, no gender differences were found in the frequency of emotions or in the particular types of emotions referenced. Furthermore, gender composition was not related to the linguistic form of emotion expression. The findings (a) suggest that examining the form of emotion talk is a potentially useful strategy for studying how people verbally convey emotions and (b) lend support to contextual models of behavior.