The Role of Emotion Regulation in the Expressive Writing Intervention

Expressive Writing (EW) involves asking participants to write emotionally about stressful life events and has been associated with improvements in psychological and physical health. The purpose of the current study was to extend previous work by examining the moderating and mediating role of emotion regulation within the EW intervention. Sixty participants who had experienced a traumatic event were recruited from the community and were assigned to an EW or control writing condition. Measures assessing emotion regulation and indices of psychological and physical health were administered at baseline and one month follow-up to determine changes in symptomatology. In comparison to control writing, EW led to significant improvements in depression, emotional clarity, and to a lesser degree emotional awareness. Although no other group differences were found, all participants demonstrated significant improvements in their symptoms of posttraumatic stress, reported physical health, overall emotion regulation abilities, their ability to accept their emotions, engage in goal directed behaviour when distressed, and access emotion regulation strategies they perceive as effective. No support was found for our moderation hypothesis. However, a significant moderation was discovered revealing that difficulties engaging in goal directed behaviour when distressed moderated improvements in posttraumatic stress symptoms. Specifically, control participants with this emotion regulation deficit demonstrated significantly poorer outcomes than control participants without this deficit; in comparison to the EW group participants who improved similarly on posttraumatic stress symptoms regardless of their level of difficulties at baseline engaging in goal directed behavour when distressed. Additionally, baseline emotion regulation abilities predicted improvements on psychological health (but not physical health) outcome measures for both groups. No support was found for our mediation hypothesis. Exploratory analyses revealed that the EW group demonstrated greater emotional arousal in response to their writing in sessions 1 and 2, but that by session 3 their arousal had significantly decreased and was equivalent to that of the control group, which showed no changes in arousal across sessions. No support was found for the moderating or mediating influence of arousal on outcome. Results will be discussed within a model of emotional expression and emotion regulation and compared to the existing EW literature.

Department dc:contributor.department

Adult Education and Counselling Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Mattina, Justin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Watson, Jeanne

• expressive writing
• emotion regulation
• emotionally expressive writing
• affect regulation
• trauma
• posttraumatic stress disorder

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/31858

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/31858