Rude Stephanie S, Lantrip Crystal, Aguirre Vanessa A, Schraegle William A
Department of Educational Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States.
Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans at Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, Waco, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jun 13;14:1192595. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1192595. eCollection 2023.
Pennebaker's expressive writing (EW) paradigm in which participants are encouraged to explore their "deepest thoughts and feelings" about a difficult experience in several short writing sessions has yielded impressive mental health outcomes and holds great promise as a cost-effective intervention. Yet results have been difficult to replicate and it is unclear what conditions are necessary for observing the effect. Our aim was to discover reasons for the variability in EW outcomes. We explored the impact of augmenting writing instructions to encourage acceptance of emotional experience, which we thought would encourage engagement with writing; and we examined essay length, an index of writer engagement, as a possible moderator of writing outcomes.
We compared traditional expressive writing (tEW), conducted according to Pennebaker's paradigm in which participants write about a self-chosen emotional experience for 15 min at a time on each of three closely spaced days, with an acceptance-enhanced version (AEEW), identical except that it supplemented traditional instructions with encouragement of an accepting approach to emotional experience, and with a control condition which asked participants to write about their use of time on particular days. Self-reported depression was the outcome measure.
Essay length (a proxy for writer engagement) moderated effects of writing at posttest 2 weeks later: Condition differences were found only for participants who wrote longer essays: For these participants the AEEW condition outperformed both control and tEW; and tEW did not differ significantly from control.
Findings suggest that degree of engagement in the writing process may partially explain the puzzle of variable outcomes in the EW literature. Results also provide practical guidance: those who are motivated to engage deeply in the writing process are most likely to benefit; and encouraging writers to accept and to openly explore emotional experience is expected to enhance benefits.
彭尼贝克的表达性写作（EW）范式鼓励参与者在几次简短的写作过程中探索他们对一段艰难经历的“最深刻的想法和感受”，已产生了令人印象深刻的心理健康成果，并作为一种具有成本效益的干预措施具有很大的前景。然而，结果难以复制，目前尚不清楚观察到这种效果需要哪些必要条件。我们的目的是找出EW结果变异性的原因。我们探讨了增加写作指导以鼓励接受情感体验的影响，我们认为这会促进对写作的投入；并且我们将文章长度（作者投入的一个指标）作为写作结果的一个可能调节因素进行了研究。
我们将传统表达性写作（tEW）与一种增强接受性的版本（AEEW）以及一个对照条件进行了比较。tEW按照彭尼贝克的范式进行，参与者在紧挨着的三天里，每天花15分钟写下自己选择的一段情感经历；AEEW与tEW相同，只是在传统指导的基础上增加了鼓励以接受的方式对待情感体验的内容；对照条件要求参与者写下他们在特定日子里的时间使用情况。自我报告的抑郁情况是结果指标。
文章长度（作者投入的一个替代指标）在两周后的后测中调节了写作效果：仅在写出较长文章的参与者中发现了条件差异：对于这些参与者，AEEW条件的效果优于对照条件和tEW条件；tEW与对照条件没有显著差异。
研究结果表明，在写作过程中的投入程度可能部分解释了EW文献中结果变异性的谜团。结果还提供了实际指导：那些有动力深入参与写作过程的人最有可能受益；并且鼓励写作者接受并公开探索情感体验有望增强益处。
