Expressive Writing and the Role of Alexythimia as a Dispositional Deficit in Self-Disclosure and Psychological Health

Psychology students were randomly assigned to a condition in which they had to write for 20 min on 3 days or for 3 min on 1 day a factual description of disclosed traumas, undisclosed traumas, or recent social events. In the case of undisclosed traumatic events, intensive writing about these events...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of personality and social psychology 1999-09, Vol.77 (3), p.630-641
Main Authors: Páez, Darío, Velasco, Carmen, González, José Luis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Affective Symptoms - diagnosis
Affective Symptoms - psychology
Alexithymia
Biological and medical sciences
Emotional Responses
Emotional States
Emotional Trauma
Emotions
Experiences (Events)
Female
Follow-Up Studies
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Health
Human
Humans
Language
Male
Memory
Mental Health
Mental stress
Narratives
Personality. Affectivity
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Self Disclosure
Social psychology
Stress
Surveys and Questionnaires
Trauma
Writing
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Summary:Psychology students were randomly assigned to a condition in which they had to write for 20 min on 3 days or for 3 min on 1 day a factual description of disclosed traumas, undisclosed traumas, or recent social events. In the case of undisclosed traumatic events, intensive writing about these events showed a beneficial effect on affect and on the affective impact of remembering the event and appraisal. Participants who wrote briefly about an undisclosed traumatic event showed a more negative appraisal. Participants who wrote intensively about a traumatic event and had a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure, measured by a Toronto Alexithymia Scale subscale, showed a positive effect on self-reported measures of affect. Difficulty in describing feelings, an alexythimia dimension, correlated with psychological health problems, emotional inhibition, and a less introspective content of written essays about the emotional events.
ISSN:0022-3514
1939-1315
DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.77.3.630