Alert

The American Psychological Association has just issued a news release about
a study that's just been presented at the APA convention today.

Here's the news release:

"Understanding of the Positive Health Effects of Expressive Writing"

Researchers have known for some time that expressive writing can have a
positive effect on the writer¹s health, such as illness recovery. Now, in
the next generation of research, Psychologist Louise Sundararajan, PhD, EdD,
of the Forensic Unit of the Rochester Psychiatric Center, and Jeffrey A.
Richards, MA, of University of Colorado at Boulder, have shown that the
effects of affective expressions are not necessarily fixed but rather
dependent on the writer¹s mental context at the time.

This study consists of two parts: the original study and a reanalysis of
data. The original study was conducted by Dr. Anna Graybeal, who recruited
86 college undergraduates whose parents were divorced and randomly assigned
them to a control or experimental group. The control group was instructed to
write on two occasions, 30 minutes each, about time management. The
experimental group was asked to also write for a total of 60 minutes but
about their thoughts and feeling about their parents¹ divorce. For both
groups, pre-and post-writing interviews about stressful experiences of the
divorce were conducted to assess the participants¹ reactivity to provoked
stress. To measure health improvements a comprehensive battery of tests were
used, including measures of physiological arousal (such as heart rate, skin
conductance, and blood oxygen level), self reports of emotional upset (such
as questionnaires and mood scales), measures of physical and psychological
health (using health center data, self reports of illness, and symptom
checklist), and measure of cognition (working memory tests).

The original study hypothesized that those students given the expressive
writing assignment to write about their thoughts and feelings about their
parent¹s divorce would reap health improvements while those asked to write
about a non-affective subject, time management, would not.

The hypothesis proved wrong and a puzzle emerged. Results showed that both
sets of students reaped health improvements after the writing exercise--they
were less distressed, improved their mean performance on the working memory
task, and exhibited fewer psychological symptoms. The authors rightly
speculated that the post-writing improvement of the control group was
attributable to the pre-writing interview, which prompted all participants
to process issues concerning their parents¹ divorce. Thus both writing
groups had in effect been primed to process their emotions‹the experimental
group explicitly, and the control group implicitly.

The texts of both the writing assignments and the in-person interviews were
then reanalyzed using the SSWC (the Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count
program), a language analysis program developed by Dr. Sundrarajan and her
colleague Lenhart Schubert, Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Rochester. This computer program works by pattern matching which allows
it to process syntax, parts of speech, and negation, and to count
occurrences of words and phrases in a dictionary of close to 2000 entries.
Secondly, it identifies 15 categories of language use as indexes of
different information processing strategies, such as ³emotion immersion²,
³emotion distancing², ³focus on affect², ³high self focus², etc.

The results of the language analysis showed that both the experimental and
control groups seemed to be similarly aroused, and produced texts of
comparable length. Other than that, the two groups differed on practically
all of the 15 categories of language use. The experimental group used more
emotionally expressive categories as well as emotion distancing categories,
and produced a higher percentage of the sum total of categories used than
the control group, who in contrast were more relaxed, wrote more about
bodily sensations (such as ³tiredness²) and the self.

A few information-processing strategies showed the same effects across
writing conditions, for instance, emotion distancing strategies were found
to be beneficial, and high self focus detrimental, for both groups. But,
most strategies of emotion expression were beneficial‹or not, depending on
the demand characteristics of the writing condition. Thus with the
experimental group who were encouraged to express their emotions, deliberate
processing of emotions was found to be conducive to post-writing
improvement. For the control group, however, who wrote about time
management, non-conscious processing of emotions was found to be beneficial.

These results show that the effects of affective expressions are not fixed,
but rather are dependent on the writer¹s mental context at the time,² says
lead researcher Dr. Sundararajan. ³This study suggests a new direction for
research on expressive writing. The research question needs to shift from
whether to how. We can now look at the health benefits of different types of
language use in combination with different contexts of writing to learn more
about the link between language use and health.²

Presentation: ³Eavesdropping on Health: Innovative Approaches to Language
and Emotion², Louise Sundararajan, PhD, Rochester Psychiatric Center,
Session 2347, 4:00 5:50 PM, Friday, August 19, 2005, Washington Convention
Center, Room 146C.

The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the
largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in
the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists.
APA's membership includes more than 150,000 researchers, educators,
clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields
of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian
provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a
profession and as a means of promoting health, education and human welfare.

Ken

"Pseudoscience, Cross-examination, and Scientific Evidence in the Recovered
Memory Controversy":

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once
in a while, or the light won't come in."
--Isaac Asimov