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.
Asking a New Question: More Research on Writing and Healing
I’ve written here before about the research begun by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. In 1983 he asked a question that has more or less framed the field of writing and health: Can writing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings about a difficult life event result in fewer illness visits to a health clinic? The answer to that question turned out to be yes—writing can influence health visits. And in the years since, the data has been fairly consistent: expressive writing about difficult life circumstances leads to improved health outcomes. Fifteen years after Pennebaker’s groundbreaking study, Laura King, a researcher at the University of Missouri, asked a new question–a series of questions actually–that moved the research in a bit of a different direction. Her questions: What other kinds of writing might be healing? Does writing, for instance, have to be painful in order to heal? What about writing that focuses on the good part? Might that kind of writing be healing as well? Research had already shown that writing about mundane topics was not especially healing. For instance, in Pennebaker’s first study, one group of students was instructed to describe their dorm room, a topic chosen specifically because of its lack of emotional freight. And, though it’s possible that, for some students at least, the dorm room did strike a meaningful chord, as a group, and as predicted, those students who wrote about their posters and rugs and lamps did not show changes in health outcome. But what about topics that are neither painful nor mundane? What about topics that carry a more pleasant emotional charge? What health effects might writing about those topics have? Laura King asked a group of volunteers to reframe a difficult life event by writing for twenty minutes on four consecutive days on the perceived benefits of this difficult life event. Volunteers were instructed to consider a traumatic event that they had experienced and then “focus on the positive aspects of the experience. . . write about how you have changed or grown as a person as a result of the experience.” When King and her associates analyzed the results they found that the health benefits for this group were identical to those for the group that had written their deepest thoughts and feelings about a trauma. Both groups benefited equally. Perhaps this finding doesn’t surprise you. Perhaps, in hindsight, it even feels like common sense. But, after fifteen years of research on writing about trouble, it introduced a new wrinkle into the research in expressive writing and health. It opened the door to a possibility that many people had perhaps long suspected: that a vast array of different kinds of writing might be healing. Writing about the difficult part is healing. Writing about the good part is healing too. Not either or. But both and. [The source for this brief piece is The Writing Cure, edited by Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smyth, and especially Chapter 7, “Gain Without Pain? Expressive Writing and Self-Regulation,” contributed by Laura...
read moreIs the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health? (part 2)
Here’s a second study relevant to struggling, this one conducted by psychologist Eugene Gendlin in the early sixties, and discussed in the first chapter of Ann Weiser Cornell’s book, The Power of Focusing. Apparently, Gendlin, then at the University of Chicago, was interested in the question: “Why is psychotherapy helpful for some people and not others?” What he did, first, was to tape hundreds of therapy sessions, gathered from many different therapists and clients. Then he asked therapists and clients to rate whether the psychotherapy had been successful. If both agreed, and if psychological testing supported this finding, the therapy was deemed successful. This successful therapy was then compared to therapy that was considered by the participants to be a failure. When researchers listened to the tapes of successful therapy vs. unsuccessful therapy they noted one key difference. Clients in successful therapy struggled more. Ann Weiser Cornell writes: . . . at some point in the session, the successful therapy clients would slow down their talk, become less articulate, and begin to grope for words to describe something that they were feeling at the moment. If you listened to the tapes, you would hear something like this: ‘Hmmmm. How would I describe this? It’s right here. It’s . . . uh . . . it’s . . . it’s not exactly anger . . . hmmmm.’ Often the clients would mention that they experienced this feeling in their bodies, saying things like, ‘It’s right here in my chest,’ or ‘I have this funny feeling in my stomach.’ In contrast, clients who felt like the therapy was a failure didn’t struggle in this way. They were actually more articulate—or more apparently articulate—in the sense that they spoke in smooth, less interrupted ways. (They were, it would seem, more glib. They had things figured out–but nothing changed.) I find this comparison fascinating, and not inconsistent with what I often see with patients. This week, for instance, it often seemed like we were all struggling to make meaning–patients as well as myself. And I love how this study offers a rationale for not only tolerating such struggle for meaning but in fact encouraging it and perhaps celebrating it. I find myself wondering about this question: Why is writing more healing for some people than it is for others? Could it have something to do with how much a person is willing to struggle on the page? A kind of willingness, perhaps, to be initially inarticulate—and halting—and groping—in the service of eventually coming to a new understanding—perhaps a new story—or a new form for one’s story. The Power of Focusing can be found here....
read moreIs the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health?
There are two pieces of research I’ve been thinking about this month. Both are about the struggle to make meaning through language and both, I think, are relevant to this whole question of what writing and rewriting our stories. The first study, conducted by James Pennebaker and colleagues in 1997, shows that when people used increasing numbers of insight words or causal words in their writing they showed improvements in health. Examples of insight words are realize, understand, think, and consider. Examples of causal words are such words as cause, effect, reason, and because. In a discussion of this study, Pennebaker writes: “The present analyses indicated that changes in thinking patterns—as opposed to static thinking patterns, which do not change over time—predict improved health.” I find this study terribly interesting. The researchers weren’t trying to measure how insightful these narratives people wrote were, or whether or not they were “good” narratives. What they were measuring—and what seemed to matter—was this process of finding meaning—this indication that, over time, thinking patterns changed. And this process of finding meaning is suggested by sentences that included cognitive words and that might look something like this: I’m beginning to realize . . . I think perhaps . . . I thought I understood what had happened, but now I’m considering . . . Changes in thinking patterns—as opposed to static thinking patterns, which do not change over time—predict improved health. It’s the kind of statement that’s worth considering, I think, and coming back to. It’s the kind of finding that has implications not just for writing and healing, but for healing itself—–...
read moreWhat About the Research on Writing and Falling Apart?
In 1983, James Pennebaker, a psychologist, then at Southern Methodist University, conducted, along with one of his graduate students, Sandra Beall, a study of forty-six college students. Students in one group—the experimental group—were instructed to write continuously for fifteen minutes about the most upsetting or traumatic experience of their lives. Their instructions included the following: In your writing, I want you to discuss your deepest thoughts and feelings about the experience. You can write about anything you want. But whatever you choose, it should be something that has affected you very deeply. Ideally, it should be something you have not talked [about] with others in detail. It is critical, however, that you let yourself go and touch those deepest emotions and thoughts that you have. In other words, write about what happened and how you felt about it, and how you feel about it now. In essence, these students were being invited to write about a time when something had fallen apart. Students wrote sitting alone in a small cubicle in the psychology building. They wrote on four consecutive days and did not sign their names to their pieces. These were not students who had been recruited because they were experiencing emotional or physical problems. These were ordinary college students recruited from introductory psychology classes. They wrote about the divorce of parents, about loss and abuse, about alcoholism and suicide attempts. They wrote about secrets. And in interviews conducted after finishing the four writing sessions, students actually reported feeling worse than they had before the writing. But four months later, these same students, compared to students who had written about trivial topics, reported improvements in mood and in outlook on life, and, perhaps most surprisingly, improvements in their physical health. When data came in from the student health center, it revealed that this same group of students had in fact visited the student health center for illness, on average, only half as often as their peers. This particular kind of writing—writing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings about trouble—is sometimes called expressive writing. And it’s the kind of writing about which much of the research on writing and health has been conducted. Since that early study in 1983, expressive writing has been tested in a wide range of settings. It’s been shown to improve self-reported health, psychological well-being, grade point average, and re-employment after lay-off. It’s been shown to benefit women with breast cancer, to decrease blood pressure in people with hypertension, to mitigate pain and fatigue in those with fibromyalgia, and to improve markers of immune function for those with AIDS. In an afterward to The Writing Cure, a compilation of research and theory published nearly twenty years after Pennebaker’s first study on expressive writing and health, he reflects on some of the implications of the body of research in the field. He writes: All of the evidence would suggest that writing brings about a general reduction in biological stress. That is, when an individual has come to terms with an upsetting experience, he or she is less vigilant about the world and potential threats. This results in an overall lowering of defenses. . . . Given the broad range of improvements in health outcomes, it would be prudent to conclude that writing provokes a rather broad and nonspecific...
read moreWhat should people write about to enjoy the health benefits of writing?
The seventh chapter of The Writing Cure, an anthology by researchers in the field of writing and health, is written by Laura King, a research psychologist at the University of Missouri. Near the end of her chapter she poses this question: “What should people write about to enjoy the health benefits of writing?” Her conclusion is succinct. “Writing about topics that allow us to learn about our own needs and desires may be a way to harness the positive benefits of writing.” It’s the kind of sentence that seems worth writing again, for emphasis: Writing about topics that allow us to learn about our own needs and desires may be a way to harness the positive benefits of writing. And how then does one begin this...
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