A growing body of research demonstrates that when individuals talk or write about personal upheavals in their lives, they become less distressed and physically healthier. Several preliminary studies suggest that many of these health effects are the result of translating feelings and images into language. It is hypothesized that putting an experience into words results in less intense emotional responses and facilitates the cognitive processing of the experience. Over the three of the grant, a series of studies with college students and distressed recently unemployed adults will be conducted. The grant proposal is divided into two interdependent projects. The first involves five experiments that examine how the verbal expression of emotion affects subsequent emotion language, cognitive organization, and autonomic activity. It is hypothesized that when individuals verbally express an emotion, immediate drops in autonomic nervous system activity, lowered self-reported emotional intensity, and improvements in the ability to cognitively organized the emotional experience follow. Working in collaboration with another research group, this paradigm will be extended to learning the links between writing about emotional topics and longterm health and immune activity. Specifically, we predict that using emotion language will ultimately affect health, with changes in emotional intensity and cognitive organization of the events serving as mediators. The second phase of the project explores how putting an event into language influences individual's daily thoughts and emotions. Across two studies, college students and recently unemployed adults will undergo the Experience Sampling Method wherein they will be """"""""beeped"""""""" multiple times per day in the week before and after writing about either emotional or control topics. It is predicted that writing will exert its impact on health by reducing daily negative emotions and ruminations about upsetting events.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 33 publications
