Coping with Stressful Events: Use of Cognitive Words in Stressful Narratives and the Meaning-Making Process

Abstract

the use of cognitive words in narratives of negative events and the association with the meaning-making process were examined. Cognitive word use, a past predictor of beneficial outcomes from the expressive writing intervention, was related to the process of meaning making in Study 1. this finding was true for memories that lacked psychological closure. in Study 2, we replicated the finding that cognitive word use is related to the meaning-making process using an alternative measure of meaning making. however, cognitive word use was not found to be related to the outcome of meaning making. the extent to which participants were engaged in meaning-making was negatively related to narrative coherence. these results suggest that the meaning-making process may be a precursor to achieving narrative coherence. Additionally, participants randomly assigned to expressive writing instructions engaged in the meaning-making process to a greater extent than participants asked to simply describe their negative event, suggesting that expressive writing encourages the meaning-making process.

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology –- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality

“…Previous research indicates that narrative coherence has an inverse relationship with cognitive processing words (Klein and Boals, 2010;Boals et al, 2011). Boals et al (2011) show that cognitive process words are related to sense making as a process which occurs prior to the development of a narrative (sense making as an outcome). This might suggest that dreamers do not tend to be caught up in why they had a given dream as much as explaining what happened.…”

Trauma Experience, Identity, and Narratives

“…In the creative process of narrating, an initially disorganized or less structured mental representation is made more integrated and coherent, and this explains the efficacy of expressive writing (Boals, Banks, & Hathaway, 2011).Use of cognitive words in writing has been used by Pennebaker and Francis (1996) to indicate the extent to which the writer has achieved a coherent narrative. The increased amount of cognitive processing is associated with the writer's effort to fit their narrative for the new event into their existing schema.…”

“…393). Meaning making is viewed as a core feature of the coping process and is generally related to positive outcomes (Bergner,2009;Boals, Banks, & Hathaway, 2011;Wilson, 2004).…”

The Use of Meaning Making in Expressive Writing: When Meaning is Beneficial

“…Indeed, cognitive word use has been shown to be related to measures of going through the process of meaning making (Boals, Banks, Hathaway, & Schuettler, 2011). A core human motive is to find meaning, value, and purpose in one's life (Baumeister, 1991).…”

“…Given that there are numerous ways to operationalize meaning making (Park, 2010), the role of meaning making in expressive writing should be examined using more than just one of the many available measures of meaning making. Both of these measures have been used as measures of meaning making in previous research (Boals et al, 2011) and are less subject to bias than selfreports. However, neither judges' ratings nor cognitive word use is posited to be superior to the measures used by Park and Blumberg.…”