Tracking Secret-Keeping in Emails

How do people communicate with others once they begin harboring a major life secret? Sixty-one adults who started keeping a major secret within the past several years agreed to have their email correspondence analyzed. Changes in emailing frequency and word use between secret keepers and their contacts were identified from before and during secret keeping. Surprisingly, there was no evidence for social withdrawal during secret keeping. Instead, the findings support a hypervigilance hypothesis in which secret keepers communicated more frequently and exhibited more engagement with contacts presumably in an attempt to monitor their social interactions.

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