Confronting traumatic experience and immunocompetence: A reply to Neale, Cox, Valdimarsdottir, and Stone.

In their comment, Neale, Cox, Valdimarsdottir, and Stone (1988) argued that one should not conclude, based on our findings, that there is any positive effect of a brief psychotherapeutic writing treatment on immunocompetence. We disagree. Our experimental technique of having subjects write about the most traumatic experiences of their lives has now been shown to reduce health center visits for illness in three studies in two laboratories. In the Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser (1988) study, we found that those subjects who wrote about traumatic experiences showed an improvement in one immunological assay (blastogenesis with the mitogen phytohemagglutinin) relative to control subjects who wrote about trivial topics. Furthermore, theoretically meaningful internal analyses demonstrated similar effects with another mitogen, concanavalin A. Although it is not possible to pinpoint the exact physiological links, consideration of all of the data indicate that confronting traumatic experience is, in all probability, physically beneficial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)