Further Examination of the Exposure Model Underlying the Efficacy of Written Emotional Disclosure.

In the current study, the authors examined the effects of systematically varying the writing instructions for the written emotional disclosure procedure. College undergraduates with a trauma history and at least moderate posttraumatic stress symptoms were asked to write about (a) the same traumatic experience, (b) different traumatic experiences, or (c) nontraumatic everyday events across 3 written disclosure sessions. Results show that participants who wrote about the same traumatic experience reported significant reductions in psychological and physical symptoms at follow-up assessments compared with other participants. These findings suggest that written emotional disclosure may be most effective when individuals are instructed to write about the same traumatic or stressful event at each writing session, a finding consistent with exposure-based treatments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The costs and benefits of writing, talking, and thinking about life's triumphs and defeats.

Three studies considered the consequences of writing, talking, and thinking about significant events. In Studies 1 and 2, students wrote, talked into a tape recorder, or thought privately about their worst (N = 96) or happiest experience (N = 111) for 15 min each during 3 consecutive days. In Study 3 (N = 112), students wrote or thought about their happiest day; half systematically analyzed, and half repetitively replayed this day. Well-being and health measures were administered before each study's manipulation and 4 weeks after. As predicted, in Study 1, participants who processed a negative experience through writing or talking reported improved life satisfaction and enhanced mental and physical health relative to those who thought about it. The reverse effect for life satisfaction was observed in Study 2, which focused on positive experiences. Study 3 examined possible mechanisms underlying these effects. Students who wrote about their happiest moments--especially when analyzing them--experienced reduced well-being and physical health relative to those who replayed these moments. Results are discussed in light of current understanding of the effects of processing life events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Healing the wounds of organizational injustice: Examining the benefits of expressive writing.

Clinical and health psychology research has shown that expressive writing interventions—expressing one's experience through writing—can have physical and psychological benefits for individuals dealing with traumatic experiences. In the present study, the authors examined whether these benefits generalize to experiences of workplace injustice. Participants (N = 100) were randomly assigned to write on 4 consecutive days about (a) their emotions, (b) their thoughts, (c) both their emotions and their thoughts surrounding an injustice, or (d) a trivial topic (control). Post-intervention, participants in the emotions and thoughts condition reported higher psychological well-being, fewer intentions to retaliate, and higher levels of personal resolution than did participants in the other conditions. Participants in the emotions and thoughts condition also reported less anger than did participants who wrote only about their emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It's OK to ask about past abuse.

Comments on the article by K. Becker-Blease and J. Freyd (see record 2006-03947-003), which addressed the ethics of asking and not asking research subjects about abuse. In their article, they systematically reviewed often-voiced concerns about and objections to asking questions about child maltreatment in survey research. They concluded that by failing to ask about a history of child maltreatment, an important predictor of later-life problems may be overlooked. The current authors discuss the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which provides strong evidence of the association between early traumatic experiences and some of the major public health problems facing our nation. Results from the ACE study have shown an association between traumatic childhood experiences and a broad range of health outcomes, including liver disease, ischemic heart disease, reproductive health, and mental illness, as well as a variety of health risks such as obesity, smoking, and alcoholism. The associations that these studies showed demonstrate that researchers studying health outcomes who do not ask study subjects about traumatic childhood experiences are overlooking an important risk factor for many of the major health issues of our day. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychophysiology of confession: Linking inhibitory and psychosomatic processes.

We investigated the short-term autonomic correlates of disclosing personal and traumatic experiences among two samples of healthy undergraduates. In Experiment 1, subjects talked into a tape recorder about extremely stressful events that had occurred in their lives, as well as what they planned to do following the experiment. Skin conductance, blood pressure, and heart rate were continuously measured. Based on judges' ratings of subjects' depth of disclosure, subjects were classified as high or low disclosers. Talking about traumatic events was associated with decreased behavioral inhibition, as measured by lower skin conductance levels among high disclosers. Disclosing traumatic material was also associated with increased cardiovascular activity. In Experiment 2, subjects both talked aloud and thought about a traumatic event and about plans for the day. Half of the subjects were alone in an experimental cubicle and talked into a tape recorder; the remaining subjects talked to a silent "confessor" who sat behind a curtain. Among high disclosers, both talking and thinking about traumatic events produced lower skin conductance levels than did thinking or talking about plans for the day. The presence of a confessor inhibited subjects' talking. Implications for understanding the nature of confession and the development of an inhibitory model for psychosomatic processes are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression facilitates forgiveness.

The authors examined the effects of writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression on forgiveness. Participants (N = 304) were randomly assigned to one of three 20-min writing tasks in which they wrote about either (a) traumatic features of the most recent interpersonal transgression they had suffered, (b) personal benefits resulting from the transgression, or (c) a control topic that was unrelated to the transgression. Participants in the benefit-finding condition became more forgiving toward their transgressors than did those in the other 2 conditions, who did not differ from each other. In part, the benefit-finding condition appeared to facilitate forgiveness by encouraging participants to engage in cognitive processing as they wrote their essays. Results suggest that benefit finding may be a unique and useful addition to efforts to help people forgive interpersonal transgressions through structured interventions. The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory-18-Item Version (TRIM-18) is appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts.

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expressive writing for gay-related stress: Psychosocial benefits and mechanisms underlying improvement.

Objective: This study tested the effectiveness of an expressive writing intervention for gay men on outcomes related to psychosocial functioning. Method: Seventy-seven gay male college students (mean age = 20.19 years, SD = 1.99) were randomly assigned to write for 20 min a day for 3 consecutive days about either (a) the most stressful or traumatic gay-related event in their lives or (b) a neutral topic. We tested an exposure-based hypothesis of written emotional expression by asking half of the participants who were assigned to write about gay-related stress to read their previous day’s narrative before writing, whereas the other half did not. Posttest and 3-month follow-up outcomes were assessed with common measures of overall psychological distress, depression, physical health symptoms, and positive and negative affect. Gay-specific social functioning was assessed with measures of gay-related rejection sensitivity, gay-specific self-esteem, and items regarding openness and comfort with one’s sexual orientation. Results: Participants who wrote about gay-related stress, regardless of whether they read their previous day’s writing, reported significantly greater openness with their sexual orientation 3 months following writing than participants who wrote about a neutral topic, F(1, 74) = 6.66, p     

Comment on Alpert, Brown, and Courtois (1998): The science of memory and the practice of psychotherapy.

Comments on the article by J. L. Alpert et al (see record 2000-13581-002), which presents the American Psychological Association Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse report, citing their uncritical review of the literature dealing with trauma, their dismissal of work on memory and its development, and their use of flawed logic concerning causal inference which may be interpreted by therapists as a license to continue with their current beliefs and practices. P. A. Ornstein et al analyze the Alpert et al claims. They address interrelated issues concerning the nature of memory for traumatic events, focusing on the argument that these memories are somehow different from memory for nontraumatic experiences. They explore the evidentiary basis for claims that memories of traumatic experiences may be repressed or dissociated and that trauma that is repeated is not remembered as well as single traumatic episodes. Then they raise issues about the development of memory in children and discuss the consequences of infantile amnesia for the recoverability of memories of early experiences. Last, they turn to matters of causal inference, exploring the problems associated with attempting to implicate early abuse in the development of subsequent problems of adaptation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of written emotional expression: The role of positive expectancies.

Objective: Writing in an emotional way about stressful or traumatic experiences has beneficial effects on emotional well-being and physical health. Yet the mechanisms that underlie these effects still need to be explored. Integrating research on the effects of positive expectancies, the authors suggest that positive effects of written emotional expression may, in part, depend on expectancies induced by writing about emotional experiences. Design: Two studies were conducted to test this hypothesis. In both studies, participants wrote about either an upsetting event or trivial issues. After the writing period, participants rated their expectancies that the writing intervention would improve (or impair) their emotional well-being over time. Main Outcome Measures: Study 1 assessed the emotional impact of an upsetting event, whereas Study 2 assessed subjective reports of physical symptoms. In both studies, outcome variables were collected both before and 6 weeks after the writing intervention. Results: The results showed that (a) writing about upsetting experiences induced higher positive expectancies than writing about trivial issues and (b) expectancies associated with written emotional expression were related to a reduction in the emotional impact of an upsetting event (Study 1) and to a reduction in physical symptoms (Study 2). Conclusions: There may be 2 alternative ways to render written emotional expression effective in reducing negative emotions: (a) by rendering an emotional experience more meaningful and (b) by inducing positive affect regulation expectancies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of disclosure of traumatic events on illness behavior among psychiatric prison inmates.

To assess the health effects of writing about traumatic events in a clinical population, 98 psychiatric prison inmates were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions in which they were asked to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding upsetting experiences (trauma writing condition), write about trivial topics (trivial writing control), or go about their daily routine without writing (no-writing control). Both writing groups wrote for 20 min per day for 3 consecutive days. Participants in the trauma condition reported experiencing more physical symptoms subsequent to the intervention relative to those in the other conditions. Despite this, controlling for prewriting infirmary visits, sex offenders in the trauma writing condition decreased their postwriting infirmary visits. These results are congruent with predictions based on stigmatization and inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trauma, mental representation, and the organization of memory for mother-referent material

Research on the effects of child maltreatment and exposure to community violence suggests that children who experience these types of traumatic events may be at risk for alterations and biases in attention and memory similar to those that have been observed in adults suffering from traumatic stress reactions. Along these lines, attachment theory posits that representational models of relationships also may act as moderators of similar cognitive biases by selectively guiding children's attention to and processing of interpersonal stimuli. Building upon the trauma and attachment literatures, the present investigation examined the links among trauma, representational models of caregivers, and children's memory for mother-relevant information using an incidental recall task in a sample of maltreated (n = 71) and nonmaltreated (n = 102) children between the ages of 8 and 13 years. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that experiences of trauma and representational models of caregivers are associated with differences in the way children process and retrieve information about positive and negative mother attribute words. In particular, experiences of trauma initially were associated with increased insecurity in children's representational models. Moreover, the interaction of traumatic experience and security of mental representation predicted children's recall for mother attribute words: victimized children with insecure models recalled the highest proportion of negative mother stimuli. Trauma and mental representation did not have a consistent effect on structurally encoded aspects of recall. Results were discussed in terms of the ways in which children who have experienced trauma process information about their worlds. The importance of assessing functioning in multiple developmental domains when studying memory also was discussed.     

The seriously ill or dying analyst and the limits of neutrality.

Discusses a major dilemma that confronts the analyst who suffers from a prolonged or terminal illness. How much factual information should be revealed to patients concerning the illness and the prognosis? The impact of the illness on communications with the patient (e.g., how appointments are canceled) is explored. Discussion focuses on accounts by 4 analysts who suffered serious illnesses and wrote about their experiences. Transference and countertransference issues are considered, followed by relevant references to neutrality—its uses and abuses—when serious illness strikes. It is argued that the analyst cannot hide behind the concept of neutrality to avoid facing the demands of unusual situations in the analytic experience. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relation between immunity and health: Comment on Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser.

Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser (1988) recently presented data showing changes in health care visits and immunological functioning as a result of a brief experimental manipulation in which subjects disclosed past traumatic events. The authors did not fully discuss the apparent parallel changes that occurred as they were assessed by two dependent measures, symptom-related and immunologic, and the data, therefore, may have been misinterpreted. In this article, we discuss the findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evaluative judgments of aspects of life as a function of vicarious exposure to hedonic extremes.

In 2 experiments with 156 female undergraduates, the hypothesis was corroborated that vicarious exposure to hedonic extremes—especially the hedonically negative—results in contrast regarding evaluative judgments of aspects of life that have evolved or been acquired in the course of life beyond the laboratory. In Exp I, Ss who wrote about hedonically negative events occurring at the turn of the century expressed greater satisfaction on a composite index of present life quality than Ss who wrote about hedonically positive events. In Exp II, Ss who wrote about hedonically negative events (personal tragedies) scored higher on a composite index of satisfaction with life, health, and physical appearance than Ss who wrote about hedonically positive events. The findings for the composites corroborate a comparison level model of evaluative judgment. The findings for individual items, however, suggest that aspects of life are not evaluated in terms of a single utility scale and standard—the comparison level. Other findings are discussed that appear to contradict a simple affective model of evaluation in which the positivity of evaluations is postulated to increase with the positivity of affective states. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease.

Examined whether writing about traumatic events would influence long-term measures of health as well as short-term indicators of physiological arousal and reports of negative moods in 46 introductory psychology students. Also examined were aspects of writing about traumatic events (i.e., cognitive, affective, or both) that were most related to physiological and self-report variables. Ss wrote about either personally traumatic life events or trivial topics on 4 consecutive days. In addition to health center records, physiological measures and self-reported moods and physical symptoms were collected throughout the experiment. Findings indicate that, in general, writing about both the emotions and facts surrounding a traumatic event was associated with relatively higher blood pressure and negative moods following the essays, but fewer health center visits in the 6 mo following the experiment. It is concluded that, although findings should be considered preliminary, they bear directly on issues surrounding catharsis, self-disclosure, and a general theory of psychosomatics based on behavioral inhibition. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-advocacy and self-esteem.

Explored the utility of treating self-esteem as an attitude that might be vulnerable to the same kinds of experimental manipulations usually directed at more traditional, less consequential attitudinal issues. Within an attitudinal advocacy paradigm, 109 undergraduates wrote 3 essays either about their personality attributes or about social propositions. Half the Ss writing on each of these topics were told to advocate a positive position (i.e., self-laudatory or proposition supporting) in their essays. The remaining Ss, although induced to advocate positive positions, were led to believe that they could elect to write negative (self-deprecatory or issue-opposing) essays. As anticipated, Ss who wrote the self-laudatory essays subsequently rated themselves more favorably than did Ss who wrote in support of social propositions. The latter Ss showed a corresponding advocacy effect with regard to the social proposition that they had espoused. The manipulation of perceived choice did not influence the magnitude of the advocacy effect. The results are regarded as encouraging with respect to the application of laboratory-derived attitude change procedures to issues of high personal relevance and clinical importance. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Simple solutions to a complex problem: A response to Rodman, Pratto, and Nelson (1988).

Rodman, Pratto, & Nelson (1988) take issue with the classification of youngsters who are unsupervised after school, but not in their own home, as "latchkey" or "self-care" children in studies that examine the effects of after-school care experiences on children's behavior and development. They also take issue with including young adolescents, 14-15 years, in such studies. On the basis of these concerns, they dismiss as spurious and misleading findings from a previous study (Steinberg, 1986), which suggested that latchkey youngsters who spend after-school hours away from home may be at greater risk for misbehavior than latchkey youngsters who are in their own homes. They then propose that researchers use the term self-care to refer only to elementary-school youngsters who are home alone (or with a younger sibling) after school. Arguments against these proposals are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distress in spouses of service members with symptoms of combat-related PTSD: Secondary traumatic stress or general psychological distress?

Combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is linked with elevated psychological distress in service members'/veterans' spouses. Researchers use a variety of terms to describe this distress, and recently, secondary traumatic stress and secondary traumatic stress disorder (STS/STSD) have become increasingly commonly used. Although STS/STSD connotes a specific set of symptoms that are linked to service members'/veterans' symptoms, researchers often use general measures of distress or generically worded measures of PTSD symptoms to assess STS/STSD. To determine how often scores on such measures appear to be an accurate reflection of STS/STSD, we examined responses to a measure of PTSD symptoms in 190 wives of male service members with elevated levels of PTSD symptoms. Wives rated their own PTSD symptoms, and then answered questions about their attributions for the symptoms they endorsed. Fewer than 20% of wives who endorsed symptoms on the PTSD measure attributed these symptoms completely to their husbands' military experiences. Moreover, compared with wives who attributed symptoms only to events in their own lives, wives who attributed symptoms completely or partially to their husbands' military experiences had a greater overlap between some of their responses on the PTSD measure and their responses to a measure of general psychological distress. These results suggest that most wives of service members/veterans with PTSD experience generic psychological distress that is not conceptually consistent with STS/STSD, although a subset does appear to endorse a reaction consistent with this construct. Implications of these findings for intervention and research with this vulnerable population are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)