JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Previous work has demonstrated that thought disclosure can have psychological benefits, but research has focused predominantly on structured written disclosure (i.e. expressive writing). In contrast, very little is known about the effects of verbal disclosure, especially immediate effects following naturally occurring emotional events. Perceived control (PC) has been proposed as one mechanism that could underlie improved affect following disclosure.

Objective:

The study had three key aims: 1) to examine whether verbal disclosure of emotional events immediately increases PC and improves affect in daily life, 2) to test whether affective language in verbal disclosures corresponds to momentary PC and affect, and 3) to investigate which disclosure content is associated with subsequent changes in PC and affect.

Methods:

A transdiagnostic clinical sample of 52 adults completed 14 days of ecological momentary assessment. Participants reported naturally occurring positive and negative emotional events and were micro-randomized at the event level to verbally disclose the event (66.7%) or a no-disclosure control condition (33.3%). PC over the emotional state and affective valence were assessed before and approximately 5 minutes after the manipulation. Across the study, participants reported 1,557 emotional events and provided 1,039 audio recordings. We tested the effects of disclosure using multilevel models. We additionally quantified the affective content of speech using dictionary-based lexical analyses and used a large language model to code seven higher-order disclosure features in negative-event recordings: situation description, specific emotion labeling, reappraisal, solution orientation, acceptance, self-validation, and self-criticism.

Results:

Verbal disclosure did not significantly increase PC from before to after speaking (b = 1.90, p = .06), and change in PC did not differ between disclosure and control conditions (b = 0.82, p = .47). However, increases in PC were strongly associated with more positive changes in affect (b = 0.22, p <.001). Lexical analyses showed that participants used more positive and more affect-related language on occasions when they reported more positive affect and higher PC than usual. LLM-based analyses showed that disclosures predominantly contained situation description and emotion labeling, whereas several more explicitly regulatory processes occurred infrequently. None of the seven LLM-derived content features significantly predicted immediate change in affect or PC.

Conclusions:

To our knowledge, this was the first study to experimentally test verbal disclosure of naturally occurring emotional events in daily life. Brief recounting primarily elicited situation description and emotion labeling, with little evidence of more explicit regulatory processes. Although disclosure did not immediately improve PC, the study demonstrates the feasibility of experimentally studying verbal disclosure and its content in everyday life. Future work should test more targeted prompts in larger samples.