Emotions Color Health Effects of Expressive Writing
Expressive writing, the art of putting individual thought and feeling on paper, has long been known to improve health and speed recovery. Now, a new study finds this effect may be influenced by the writer’s mental state at the time of writing.
The U.S. study included 86 college undergraduates whose parents were divorced. The students were divided into two groups after an interview in which they first described their feelings about the divorce.
One group was told to write for a total of 60 minutes about their thoughts and feelings about their parents’ divorce. The other group of “controls” was told to write for a total of 60 minutes about a less emotional issue, time management.
Following the exercise, the participants’ physical and mental health were measured by the researchers.
The research team found that both groups reaped cognitive and psychological benefits from the exercise, including lowered levels of stress and improved memory.
The key may lie in the pre-test interview: the researchers believe that, regardless of what they were writing about, talking about their parents divorce “primed” the participants to better process their emotions, even if they were writing about a non-emotional issue (time management).
“These results show that the effects of [emotional] expression are not fixed, but rather are dependent on the writer’s mental context at the time,” study lead researcher Louise Sundararajan, a psychologist at Rochester Psychiatric Center, said in a prepared statement.
I’m curious to read about more on this.
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3 Comments to
“Emotions Color Health Effects of Expressive Writing”
As described, the study shows no benefit from writing. Tbe interetation suggests an effect from the pre-test interview. Plausible, but we need a non-interviewd group to draw that conclusion.
I respectfully disagree with Selby’s conclusion. It seems to me that the study did confirm the positive results of “expressive writing”, although the researchers did hedge a bit by suggesting that the pre-writing interview may have affected the results. Where I do agree with Selby is the idea that we need a control group of non-interviewees to determine what if any effect the earlier interview may have had. Now to be totally nonscientific (drawing from a study of one: namely myself) I find it always eases my anxieties and other negative feelings to write in my journal, although focusing on more positive aspects of my day not surprisingly leaves me in a better mood than focusing on negative experiences. Nevertheless, I find that putting pen to paper helps me to calm my nerves and sort out my feelings, so I will continue my own “expressive writing” regardless of professional opinions!!
Personally, I doubt any real conclusions can be successfully drawn from the write-up. Anyone who has dabbled in creative writing knows ““These results show that the effects of [emotional] expression are not fixed, but rather are dependent on the writer’s mental context at the time,” ” To me, this merely restates the already known aspects of writing: writers write what they feel. I would be interested in reading the actual study results, as I think the write-up missed a key point: it tells me nothing about how the emotions color any health effects of writing.
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 21 Aug 2005
