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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Affect labeling in the age of social media

Does tweeting your feelings change how you feel? A study of over a billion tweets shows that we tend to tweet about our feelings after they have escalated. However, such ‘affect labeling’ tweets — even though they are constrained to 140 characters — lead to rapid reductions in the intensity of our emotions.

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Correspondence to Matthew D. Lieberman.

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Lieberman, M.D. Affect labeling in the age of social media. Nat Hum Behav 3, 20–21 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0487-0

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