2003 Volume 11 Issue 2 Pages 99-109
The purpose of the present study was to identify the situations that elicit the feeling of "leaking internal information" in normal university students, and describe them. In Study 1, we asked them to indicate the frequency of self-leakage feelings and describe the experiences in an open-ended response. Of the fifteen situations that were listed, nine were shown to be rather prevalent ; more than 50% of respondents said that they had had such an experience. In Study 2, exploratory factor analysis extracted nine factors ; affection toward opposite, heart-to-heart, praised, empathic, feeling dirty, blushing, seen through, pretending calm, and awkward toward partner situations. Furthermore, these situations were characterized in terms of three aspects : the content-What leaks out ; the outcome-What will happen if it leaks out ; and the partner-What kind of person it leaks to. Finally, we redefined the feeling of self-leakage as "the experience of feeling that one's own internal information is leaking to others, although nothing much is said, and negative outcomes due to the leakage are anticipated."
