Cognitive and Emotional Processing in Narratives of Women Abused by Intimate Partners

Abstract

This study examined relationships between cognitive and emotional processing with changes in pain and depression among intimate partner violence survivors. Twenty-five women who wrote about their most traumatic experiences completed measures of pain and depressive symptoms before the first writing session and again 4 months following the last writing session. Reduced pain was significantly associated with less use of positive and negative emotion words. Relationships between cognitive and emotional aspects of writing with changes in depressive symptoms fell short of statistical significance. The results suggest that emotional processing in narrative writing predicts changes in pain in intimate partner violence survivors.

Effects and Linguistic Analysis of Written Traumatic Emotional Disclosure in an Eating-Disordered Population

“…11,32 One study found that this trend was related to improvements in somatic symptoms but not in subjective distress, suggesting only certain types of benefits are derived. 30 Our study demonstrated increasing use of causation words and significantly greater use of cognitive words in the disclosure group but without reduction in eating-disorder symptoms or cognitions, which is consistent with previous findings. 11 We also analyzed how common references to food were in the writings.…”

“…29 In our study, the disclosure group used significantly more negative-emotion words on all 3 days of writing, suggesting active immersion in the traumatic event. 30 The group also used significantly more positive words on Days 2 and 3, which has been correlated with health in many traumatic emotional disclosure studies. 20 Given the increase in positive word use in the disclosure group, we would have expected some health benefit.…”

Linguistic Indicators of Pain Catastrophizing in Patients With Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain

“…For example, Holmes and colleagues (16) found that higher use of affect-related words in women’s description of partner violence reflected greater immersion in the traumatic event, which predicted heightened experience of physical pain. With regard to our sample, the increased expression of negative emotionality in people’s essays might, therefore, reflect a pronounced affective involvement by patients who catastrophize when schemata of the pain experience are activated – a finding that is consistent with attention and information processing models (37) and relates to research on self-pain enmeshment (31).…”

A study of tweet chats for breast cancer patients

“…You may not know that ZZZZ spent more than 5 yrs in clinical trial recruitment, advising companies & sites on how to best reach pts Rare Topic Experts @YYYY is a surgical oncologist at Cleveland Clinic with extensive experience treating male breast cancer http://t.co/6CAXbVCVQJ XXXX -A1: YES -need much more awareness that men can get breast cancer -low awareness may be part of why median age at diagnosis is higher Under psychological facets, we analyzed positive emotion, negative emotion (anger, anxiety, and sadness), and the use of cognitive mechanisms. The use of emotion words has been used to measure the degree of immersion and prior research has concluded that higher usage indicates more immersion in traumatic events [8]. The use of cognitive categories (words such as exclude, because, effect, hence) indicates more complex writing.…”