Journaling for Health Part 4: Pennebaker’s Summary

Journaling for Health Part 4: Pennebaker’s Summary

This is part 4 (of 5) of a series on journaling to improve health, or what James W. Pennebaker, the seminal scholar on the topic, calls “expressive writing.”   I’ve been doing research into expressive writing, which has been demonstrated to improve mental and physical health, in order to roll my learnings into an interactive experience currently in development.

In a 2004 commentary designed to defend the expressive writing paradigm from a press for the “whys” behind it (Sloan & Marx, 2004), James W. Pennebaker admits that the dynamic of the curative mechanism remains unknown.  However, he sums up the finer processes that participants in expressive writing studies undoubtedly experience, which are paraphrased here:

1) Participants organize previously disorganized, emotional memories of events into language, consciously giving the event a newly coherent structure or narrative.  (This mechanism has defied researchers’ understanding—i.e. although it’s tempting to say that story-making or narrative allows participants to better integrate and deal with trauma, they don’t know how or if this process might contribute to health benefits.)

2) Confronting an emotional event, or re-exposing participants to a trauma habituates the participant to the event and reduces the impact of emotional responses to it.

3) After writing about a trauma, people think less about it and free up working memory with which to focus on other tasks.

4) Past trauma effects present social interaction; over time, participants gradually change how they interact with others, are more likely to talk about the trauma, laugh about it, and subtly alter their social circles (Pennebaker, 2004).

The first of these subtle processes is intriguing for many.  Although narrative by itself cannot yet be associated with health benefits, there does appear to be something salutory about the process of changing unstructured thought or feeling into the structure of language.  In most of these studies such a dynamic is present: there is a conscious movement by the individual to give linguistic structure to previously unstructured knowledge.

References

Pennebaker, J.W. (2004). Theories, Therapies, and Taxpayers: On the Complexities of the Expressive Writing Paradigm.  Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice (Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 138-142).

Sloan, Denise M.; Marx, Brian P. (2004) Taking Pen to Hand: Evaluating Theories Underlying the Written Disclosure Paradigm.  Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice (Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 121-137).