Research on Writing and Health
The research on writing and health has made some interesting connections and contributions, much of it based on James Pennebaker’s model of writing for twenty minutes in 4 sessions in response to writing prompts.
I wrote about research early on in my work on this site so much of the research I wrote about occurs prior to 2010 or so.
Writing about Gratitude as an Antidote to the Pain of Receiving Criticism?
So, because of November, I was browsing for research on writing about gratitude. I found this interesting study, written about in the New York Times in 2011. It offers a way to think about gratitude writing as a kind of intervention when a challenge arises. The quoted passages are directly from the New York Times article. 1. The challenge: Criticism arises. (Ouch!) After turning in a piece of writing, some students received praise for it while others got a scathing evaluation: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read!” (Note: this is not a good way to respond to writing.) 2. Retaliation: Loud blasts as a way to respond? Then each student played a computer game against the person who’d done the evaluation. The winner of the game could administer a blast of white noise to the loser. Not surprisingly, the insulted essayists retaliated against their critics by subjecting them to especially loud blasts — much louder than the noise administered by the students who’d gotten positive evaluations. 3. But what if: What if one were to stop and write an essay on gratitude? But there was an exception to this trend among a subgroup of the students: the ones who had been instructed to write essays about things for which they were grateful. After that exercise in counting their blessings, they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism — or at least they didn’t feel compelled to amp up the noise against their critics. After that exercise in counting their blessings they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism. This seems potentially important—as if writing might be able to jump-start an entirely different circuit in the brain. One that doesn’t hurt so much. And perhaps there’s something particularly powerful about gratitude writing that can offer this kind of jump-start. It might be difficult to write an entire essay in the moment when a sting arises. But perhaps the introduction? The outline? The first line? It’s an appealing, though I think challenging, alternative to obsessing on the criticism—or on the loud blast that one could retaliate with. I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and learned just yesterday that they’ve set some kind of record this year by having over 30 inches of snow in November. 30 inches of snow in November! There is such an abundance to be grateful for, but I think the next time criticism arises, I might just start an essay with that—the fact that I do not have to go outside in the cold and shovel the roof. Along with the fact that I do not own a roof shovel, and do not anticipate needing to own one. The study on gratitude was conducted by Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky The New York Times article can be found here The picture is of a woman in Grand Rapids shoveling snow off her roof—with a roof shovel! (The woman is nearly cropped out of the picture, but if you look closely you can see the roof shovel there, arcing over the...
read moreA Research Study on the Health Benefits of Writing About Goals
In 2001, Laura King, one of the researchers in the field of writing and health, conducted a study in which she looked at what happened when college students wrote about something she calls “their best possible future self.” By this time, a large amount of data had already been collected on the benefits of writing to work through difficult past experiences. King became interested in exploring what other kinds of writing might be beneficial to health. Her study is one that I don’t think has been written about enough. She looked at 81 undergraduate students, randomly dividing them into four groups: a group which wrote about their most traumatic life event; a group which wrote about a best possible future self; a group which was asked to write about both; and a group which wrote about a non-emotional or control topic. Each group wrote for 20 minutes a day for 4 consecutive days. Those students selected to write about a best possible future self were instructed to write in response to this prompt: Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined. A couple of interesting results came out of this study. First, when students were tested three weeks after writing, it was found that writing about a best possible self was significantly less upsetting than writing about a traumatic life event. Second, the distress of writing about a traumatic life event was short-term. It had dissipated by five months. Third, both kinds of writing were beneficial. That is, when students were studied five months after writing, those students who wrote about a traumatic life event, those students who wrote about a best possible self, and those students who wrote about both—all of them experienced a decrease in illness. Only those students who wrote about a non-emotional topic showed no change. The study is published in the July 2001 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In her discussion, King draws the following conclusion: The act of writing down our deepest thoughts and feelings is key to the benefits of writing. However, and importantly, the contents of our deepest thoughts and feelings need not be traumatic or negative. Quite the contrary, examining the most hopeful aspects of our lives through writing—our best imagined futures, our ‘most cherished self-wishes’—might also bestow on us the benefits of writing that have been long assumed to be tied only to our traumatic histories. I think this an enormously interesting and useful study. What I do not think is that this study should be used as a reason to counsel anyone and everyone to “move forward” to “think about the future” and “let go of the past.” Rather, I think what this study does is offer evidence that both are fruitful. Looking back toward unfinished business in the past is fruitful. Looking forward to a possible future is fruitful. And it seems reasonable to conjecture that in the best possible circumstances, each person would be permitted to choose for themselves—perhaps at times with some guidance—when to look back—and when it might be time to look...
read moreExpressive Letter-Writing and a Better Night's Sleep?
Last December (2006) a study, “Health Effects of Expressive Letter Writing,” by Catherine Mosher and Sharon Danoff-Burg, was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. The study looked at what can happen when healthy college students write a letter to someone of significance in their life. 108 students were randomly divided into three groups: • Experimental group 1—students were asked to write an expressive letter to a person of significance in their life who had helped them • Experimental group 2—students were asked to write an expressive letter to a person of significance in their life who had hurt them • The control group—students were asked to write a letter to a school official on an impersonal topic At one-month follow-up two significant differences were discovered between the experimental groups and the control group. 1. As a group, those who had written to a person of significance in their life slept longer—they slept a mean of 7.1 hours compared to 6.4 hours 2. They also reported significantly fewer days in the previous month when physical or mental health symptoms prevented them from engaging in routine activities. Interestingly, no significant difference was reported between those who had written to someone who had helped them and those who had written to someone who had hurt them. Both kinds of expression—conveying thoughts and feelings to someone who had helped and to someone who had hurt—seemed of value when it came to health. And they slept longer. It’s an intriguing finding. I can’t say that I know quite what it means. But I can say that for a whole host of conditions—from depression to fibroymyalgia to treatment for cancer to the stresses and strains of ordinary life—it has been my observation, over and over, that sleep can be enormously healing. Something seems to happen when we sleep—a kind of deep restoration—that does not happen at any other time. So if a single letter like this could enhance sleep duration—well, that would seem to be of significance. [Thank you to Susan Bernard for sending me the link for this...
read moreIs Shifting One’s Point of View a Healing Habit?
In 2003, James Pennebaker and R.S. Campbell published an article that carried the intriguing title, “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. The authors proposed, based on the analysis of thousands of texts, that flexibility in a person’s use of pronouns when writing about painful memories is associated with improved health. This was not a predicted finding. It emerged when Pennebaker and associates persisted in asking the question: Why it is that writing about emotional topics results in better physical health? What actually happens? The most consistent finding prior to this 2003 study had been that people who participated in expressive writing reported that, afterwards, they actually thought differently about the experiences after they wrote about them. Pennebaker’s question then became: “Is this change in thinking reflected in the ways people write?” In other words, do people become healthier as their writing changes in some way? To try and answer this question Pennebaker used a computer program developed by researchers on artificial intelligence, a program which performs linguistic analysis on written texts. 7501 writing samples were examined. A total of 3,445,940 words. A virtual sea of words. In this sea, he looked at how a person’s writing changed over successive days—and whether or not these changes were correlated with better health. The first thing Pennebaker looked at was content. Did changing the content of one’s writing over a period of days affect health? For instance, did the health of those persons who wrote about a different topic on successive days fare better than the health of those who wrote about the same topics? The answer? It appeared to make no difference. Next, Pennebaker looked at writing style. And he discovered that when people changed their writing styles over several days they were more likely to show improvements in health. When he narrowed down these changes in style, he discovered that participants were most likely to show improvement in health if, over the course of different writing samples, they changed what pronouns they used. It’s an intriguing finding. For instance, writing from the I point of view some of the time, and then you, then we, then he or she or they correlated with better health. The finding was not a directional finding. It was not better, for instance, to move from first person to third person, or visa versa. What mattered was the simple fact of variability—flexibility. In his remarks about the study, Pennebaker makes this comment: “Pronoun choice is based on perspective.” He also admits that the finding is enigmatic. It raises more questions than it answers. For instance, does pronoun flexibility actually cause improved health, or is it a feature that merely emerges coincident with improved health? Is pronoun flexibility a skill that can be learned? Could it be like yoga? Flexibility increasing with practice? Or, to put this yet another way: is there any benefit to be gained from intentionally writing from a different point of view? Is shifting one’s point of view a potentially healing...
read moreThe Research on Fiction Writing and Health
There’s a piece of research that dovetails well with Lee Smith’s experience that I wrote about last week. It’s the only piece of research I know of that looks at what happens in terms of health when people write fiction. The study was conducted ten years ago by Greenberg et. al. and is cited in The Writing Cure, p. 106. Participants in this study—college students—were divided into three groups: A group who wrote about nonemotional events A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about a previous trauma A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about an imaginary trauma Both the group who wrote about a previous trauma and the group who wrote about an imaginary trauma had significantly fewer visits to the student health center in the month following the writing than the group who wrote about nonemotional events. Thus, writing about real trauma was beneficial. And writing about an imaginary trauma—writing fiction—was beneficial. (Granted, not all fiction has to do with trauma or difficult life events but one could argue that a fair amount of fiction touches on this area. Consider, for instance, Stephen King. Edgar Allen Poe and that telltale heart. J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Charles Dickens and all those stories of orphans. Grimm’s fairy tales. I can’t help but wonder, as I write this, if reading these stories—holding strong emotions through reading—might not also offer a kind of healing—but that perhaps is a different question for a different day—-) In a discussion of this study, the authors propose a reason that writing about imaginary trauma might be beneficial. They propose that writing about imaginary trauma may have allowed people to “accommodate themselves to negative emotions in a safe context.” This resonates for me with the words that Lee Smith used when she talked about writing her novel: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Story as a (safe) receptacle for emotion? Writing fiction as a (safe) way to hold strong emotions? Writing fiction may, of course, lead to a lot of other things as well. Beautiful novels. Moving short stories. A deeper understanding of life. A new way of looking at the world. Entertainment. Joy. All of this may happen for the reader—or for the writer. But maybe one of the other things that can happen—sometimes—for any one of us—and not just published novelists—is this opportunity for writing fiction to become a safe way to hold and digest—and perhaps transform—strong deep...
read moreA Research Study of Interest: Writing and Healing and Breast Cancer
Is there a benefit to writing for women with breast cancer? What kind of writing is most beneficial? (And might the answers to these questions be extrapolated to other groups?) To look at the first two questions, Annette Stanton, a psychologist at the University of Kansas, and Sharon Danoff-Burg, psychologist at State University of New York in Albany, conducted a study several years ago now in which they divided a group of women with breast cancer into three groups: A group instructed to write a detailed account of the facts of their breast cancer and its treatment A group instructed to write their deepest thoughts and feelings about their experience with breast cancer. This is often called expressive writing. A group instructed to write only about their positive thoughts and feelings in connection to their experience of cancer All of the women completed four twenty-minute writing sessions. And here are some things they learned from this group of women: Women who wrote about facts and women who did expressive writing reported more distress immediately after writing when compared with women who wrote only about positive feelings. At one and three months after writing, women in all three groups reported overall more positive quality of life, less distress, and “high vigor” compared with similar cancer patients who hadn’t written. Three months after writing, women who did expressive writing, and the women who wrote about positive thoughts and feelings reported a significant decrease in physical symptoms and they also had fewer visits to the doctor for cancer-related illness than women who wrote only about facts—or women who didn’t write at all. Writing about thoughts and feelings led to significant physical benefit. Thus, along with expressive writing, writing about positive thoughts and feelings—writing about the good part—was shown to be beneficial for women with breast cancer. Interestingly, though, and, I think, wisely, the authors, in the wake of these finding, advise caution in asking (or, worse, prescribing) persons who are facing adversity to find a positive benefit. They write: Indeed, exhorting individuals to ‘look on the bright side’ or to focus on a specific advantage in their misfortune is likely to be interpreted as minimizing or not understanding their plight. And they go on to name three reasons they think asking for a positive benefit was effective in this particular study: They did not suggest any woman find a particular benefit—but, instead, let women have complete control over any benefit they named and explored. The women were asked to write only after the primary treatment for their cancer had been completed. They had evidence that these women had already had opportunities to process negative emotions in other settings. This is an interesting, and potentially significant, study. And, granting, first, that all research in this field is still preliminary and that more research needs to be done, I’m taking from this study five useful bits: First, that women with breast cancer (And all women with cancer? All people with cancer? All people with illness?) have the potential to gain significant benefit from writing—whether they’re writing about all their thoughts and feelings or whether they’re writing about positive thoughts and feelings that have begun to emerge. Second, that there may be value, at some point, in focusing solely on the good part. Third, that...
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