Experiential Self‐Focus Writing as a Facilitator of Processing an Interpersonal Hurt

Abstract

The results supported the hypothesis that negative affect resulting from an interpersonal hurt would significantly decrease over time among participants in the experiential self-focus writing group compared with the control group. Implications of experiential self-focus writing for interpersonal hurt and directions for future studies are discussed.

Facilitating Emotional Processing: An Experimental Induction of Psychotherapeutically Relevant Affective States

“…Unresolved negative feelings toward a significant other person are usually referred to as 'unfinished business,' and this is a specific and well-defined problem encountered in nonclinical contexts as well as in psychotherapy (Greenberg and Safran 1987). Several studies have investigated the process of resolving such long-standing interpersonal grievances in psychotherapy (Greenberg and Foerster 1996;Greenberg and Malcolm 2002;Paivio and Greenberg 1995) and in nonclinical samples (e.g., Chen et al 2008;Liao et al 2012;McCullough et al 2006). The present study extends the research on emotional processing of interpersonally hurtful feelings by experimentally testing the impact of an induction of specific affective states on the resolution of long-standing interpersonal grievances as an affectivemeaning problem.…”

“…Such activation of painful emotions is, according to Grawe and colleagues, one of four identified mechanisms of change in psychotherapy and is usually referred to as 'problem activation' (Grawe 1997;Grawe et al 1994;Orlinsky et al 1994). Although there have been other conceptualizations of mechanisms of change (e.g., Kazdin 2007), and by now no agreement exists on the precise number of mechanisms of change in psychotherapy, Grawe's framework allows for the identification of possibly influential factors when examining emotional processing: Different degrees of problem activation in expressive writing studies might be a confounding factor when comparing emotional writing groups to low-level control groups that write about neutral events (Lepore and Greenberg 2002;Liao et al 2012). For a stringent experimental investigation it is thus necessary to control for the degree of problem activation, i.e., to test if participants are similarly emotionally activated and engaged across conditions.…”

“…A vast body of research shows that writing about upsetting experiences is a powerful way of activating emotions and is associated with long-term changes in a wide range of physiological, psychological and behavioral outcome measures (e.g., Frattaroli 2006;Murray and Segal 1994;Pennebaker 1997;Pennebaker and Beall 1986;Smyth 1998). Expressive writing paradigms have been applied in a wide range of topics, and some of them targeted particularly types of the above-mentioned interpersonal grievances as for example interpersonal hurt and transgression (Liao et al 2012;McCullough et al 2006), or romantic relationship breakups (Lepore and Greenberg 2002;Primeau et al 2013).…”

Experimental induction of state rumination: A study evaluating the efficacy of goal-cueing task in different experimental settings

“…EC2 was a shortened version of the original unresolved condition, in which participants identified only a problem in their individual goal achievement process (step 1), whereas participants in the NCC were given a neutral writing task that did not relate to personal goal but had the same extent. Participants were asked to describe what they did from the morning until the time of the experiment [61,62] instead of identifying a problem of their individual goal achievement process.…”