It’s Not You, It’s Reality TV: A Discursive Psychology Approach to Study the Use of Emotional Language During Romantic Break-Ups in a Reality Television Show

Abstract

The current literature of discursive psychology (DP) has independently analysed emotional language within reality TV programs and within romantic disputes. Due to psychological researchers studying couple conflict through therapy, interviews, and home-recordings, ‘live’ break-ups would be rare to witness within these settings and hence, there are no known DP experiments exploring break-ups. This paper aims to close the gap in the literature by using a DP approach to explore how Love Island series three contestants introduce, formulate, and manage break-ups during conversation with their romantic partners. This reality television program specifically creates an environment which has a sole entertainment purpose to inherently invoke and apprehend real people coupling and de-coupling at frequent intervals. All extracts demonstrated that a relationship problem discussion preceded the break-up formulation. The break-ups were consistently softened within either an explicit or implicit formulation of the termination of the relationship. This break-up talk is subsequently managed with acceptance terms and agreement from both speakers. In conclusion, this paper successfully analyses series three Love Island break-ups finding impression and accountability management to be constructed throughout.