Original title: Gender Differences in Self-reported Emotional Sharing in Social Interaction: A Meta Analysis
Jia, X. (Xihan), Karen Holtmaat, Mo, Y. (Yifan), ZIHAO Zeng +3 · September 2026
People often talk about their feelings with others, which helps them handle their emotions. Past studies showed that men and women might share feelings differently, but researchers disagreed on how big or steady this difference really was. To clear this up, researchers combined findings from many past studies on adults. They looked at how people openly talk about and express what they feel to friends, romantic partners, and others. They found that women report sharing their emotions more than men do. This pattern held steady almost everywhere. It stayed true whether the emotion was positive or negative, whether people felt sad, angry, or scared, and no matter who they were talking to.
Imagine you are keeping a diary of how often you talk about your feelings with friends. You notice that some people write more entries than others, and you wonder if the difference depends on whether they are talking about happy or sad things, or whether they are talking to a best friend or a sibling. But after looking at many diaries, you find that one group consistently writes more entries than the other, no matter what the topic or who they are talking to. In this paper, the researchers combined many studies and found that women consistently report sharing emotions more than men, and this pattern holds across different emotions and different people they talk to.
This matters because emotional sharing is how people regulate emotions together. Knowing that women tend to share more than men, but that the difference is small and consistent across situations, helps avoid stereotypes while acknowledging real patterns. It suggests that context doesn't change the gender gap as much as assumed.
The abstract does not state limitations explicitly, but the meta-analysis relies on self-reported emotional sharing, which may not match actual behavior. The effect size is small (g=0.31) with a wide confidence interval, and the analysis could not test for publication bias or causality. The findings are limited to adults and to the specific categories examined.
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Gender Differences in Self-reported Emotional Sharing in Social Interaction: A Meta Analysis — Jia, X. (Xihan), Karen Holtmaat, Mo, Y. (Yifan) et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/86jgx_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.