Trauma in Real Time: Talking and Avoiding Online Conversations About the Death of Princess Diana

Research on talking about trauma as a means of coping typically relies on retrospective self-reports. This study analyzed Internet chat room conversations about the death of Princess Diana for 4 weeks after her death to begin to map the ways people naturally talk about shared disasters and to seek evidence of social stages of coping. In the 1st hours and days, people exhibited high levels of personal and emotional responses to the loss of Diana. Linguistic analyses revealed strong evidence of collective shared grief in the 1st week, with a shift from greater levels of collective language to individual language after the 1st week. Ratings of the chat-room transcripts by judges revealed a shift from largely compassionate to largely hostile comments over the 4-week period. Advantages and complications of Internet chat rooms as a data source are considered.

[1]  L. Festinger A Theory of Social Comparison Processes , 1954 .

[2]  T. Helmrath,et al.  Death of an infant: parental grieving and the failure of social support. , 1978, The Journal of family practice.

[3]  D. R. Lehman,et al.  Long-term effects of losing a spouse or child in a motor vehicle crash. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  D. R. Lehman,et al.  Recipients' Perceptions of Support Attempts and Attributions for Support Attempts that Fail , 1990 .

[5]  B. Mesquita,et al.  Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotion , 1991 .

[6]  R. Kleck,et al.  Effects of talking about a stressful event on arousal: does what we talk about make a difference? , 1993, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  A Social Stage Model of Collective Coping: The Loma Prieta Earthquake and The Persian Gulf War , 1993 .

[8]  D. Segal,et al.  Emotional processing in vocal and written expression of feelings about traumatic experiences. , 1994, Journal of traumatic stress.

[9]  Bernard Rimé,et al.  Mental rumination, social sharing, and the recovery from emotional exposure. , 1995 .

[10]  R. C. Silver,et al.  Social constraints, intrusive thoughts, and depressive symptoms among bereaved mothers. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  G. Evans,et al.  The role of interior design elements in human responses to crowding. , 1996 .

[12]  Martha E. Francis,et al.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Linguistic Predictors of Adaptive Bereavement , 2022 .

[13]  M. Running Plant development: Making asymmetric flowers , 1997, Current Biology.

[14]  J. Pennebaker Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process , 1997 .

[15]  B. Rimé,et al.  Exposure to the social sharing of emotion: Emotional impact, listener responses and secondary social sharing , 1997 .

[16]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic Bases of Social Perception , 1997 .

[17]  A. Elklit The aftermath of an industrial disaster , 1997, Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica. Supplementum.

[18]  J. Smyth,et al.  Written emotional expression: effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. , 1998, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[19]  Katelyn Y. A. McKenna,et al.  Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity “Demarginalization” Through Virtual Group Participation , 1998 .

[20]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic styles: language use as an individual difference. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[21]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Who talks? The social psychology of illness support groups. , 2000, The American psychologist.