Abstract:
Over the last 20 years it has been shown that written emotional disclosure about
stressful or traumatic events can improve physical and psychological well-being. It
has been suggested that the effects of disinhibition, habituation, cognitive
restructuring, and improved self-regulation may explain these beneficial effects.
However, the results from meta-analyses indicate the effects from therapeutic writing
are modest. Attempts to identify factors that may improve the therapeutic efficacy of
writing continue. Surprisingly, one property of therapeutic writing that has remained
largely untested is that of writing frequency. The other is writing from different
points of view.
The first study presented here assessed the effect of writing frequency. This study
found no health benefits from a traditional 4-session home-based self-regulation
writing intervention. However, increasing this to 6-8 sessions, or more, resulted in
improved physical and psychological well-being, when compared to an emotionally-
neutral writing control group. Contrary to suggestions, there was no evidence to
indicate that too many sessions leads to a reduction in well-being. However, the
benefit from more frequent writing does appear to be asymptotic.
The second study was designed to explore whether writing from alternative points of
view changes the way people think about stressful or traumatic experiences. The
results indicated that point of view influenced several linguistic characteristics,
including the total number of words written over a single 20-minute writing session,
the use of words describing optimism, the differential use of tense references, and the
use of inclusion words. These findings suggest that point of view may change the
way people interpret their experiences, which may have implications for the
therapeutic effects of a written emotional disclosure task.
The third study assessed whether the therapeutic effect of a home-based self
regulation writing task was moderated by point of view. The results from this study
were inconclusive. There was some evidence to suggest that point of view may play
a role in the interpretation of stressful events, but whether these translate into
therapeutic health benefits was unclear. Writing from a third-person perspective
appeared to obtain slightly better health outcomes, although these findings were not
significant. The effect of point of view needs further investigation.