Self-Disclosure
Self-disclosure is talking about yourself, and the finding is that it is rewarding in itself rather than merely useful. Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell reported in 2012 that disclosing information about oneself recruited the same reward circuitry in the brain as food or money, and that people would give up real money for the chance to do it. It is the cleanest explanation for why people keep telling others about their lives whether or not it makes them feel better.
What it is
The claim has two halves and they carry different weight. The behavioural half is straightforward: given a choice between answering questions about themselves and answering questions about somebody else, and paid slightly more for the second, people took the money hit and talked about themselves. The brain-imaging half is the one usually quoted in headlines, and it is the weaker of the two.
Credit Tamir first. She is first author, and the work is routinely attributed to the better-known second name.
Why it belongs next to the emotion pages on this site: social sharing of emotion finds that recounting a difficult experience does not reliably shrink the feeling, which raises an obvious question about why everybody does it anyway. Self-disclosure answers it. The behaviour does not need to reduce distress in order to persist, because the telling is paying for itself.