Writing about difficult, even
traumatic, experiences appears to be good for health on
several levels – raising immunity and other health
measures and improving life functioning.
Findings
Deep disclosure improves mood, objective
and subjective health, and the ability to function well.
Classic studies by psychologist James W. Pennebaker, PhD
and his colleagues have proved the health value of
personal disclosure.
In a classic 1988 study by
Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser and Glaser, 50
healthy undergraduates were assigned to write about
either traumatic experiences or superficial topics
for four days in a row.
Six weeks after the writing
sessions, students in the trauma group reported more
positive moods and fewer illnesses than those
writing about everyday experiences.
Furthermore, improved measures of
cellular immune-system function and fewer visits to
the student health center for those writing about
painful experiences suggested that confronting
traumatic experiences was physically beneficial.
Pennebaker followed up in other
settings.
At the Dallas Memorial Center for
Holocaust Studies, he and his colleagues
videotaped interviews with more than 60 Holocaust
survivors while taking their physiological
measurements.
Later, they classified each
survivor, based on the interview, as a low, midlevel
or high "discloser."
High and midlevel disclosers were
significantly healthier a year after the interviews
than the low disclosers.
A joint 1994 study by psychologists
and outplacement firm Drake Beam Morin followed 63
professionals who had been laid off from their jobs
for eight months after they were assigned to one of
three writing conditions.
In the experimental condition,
participants were instructed to write about their
deepest thoughts and feelings about the layoff and
about how their lives, personal and professional,
had been affected.
In the control condition,
participants were told to write about their plans
for the day and their job search activities. In the
no-writing condition, participants were given no
particular writing instruction.
After five consecutive days of
30-minute writing sessions, researchers started
tracking employment status.
Participants who wrote
about losing their jobs were much more likely to
find new ones in the months following the study.
Extending the research to medical
patients, in 1999, Joshua Smyth and Arthur Stone and
colleagues at SUNY at Stony Brook assigned patients
with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis either to write
about the most stressful event of their lives or to
write about a neutral topic.
Four months later, asthma patients in
the experimental group showed improvements in lung
function and arthritis patients in the experimental
group showed a reduction in disease severity.
In all, 47 percent of the
patients who disclosed stressful events showed
clinically relevant improvement, whereas only 24
percent of the control group exhibited such improvement.
...... [Continued at the APA site.]
