Expressive writing and the role of alexythimia as a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure and psychological health.

Abstract

Psychology students were randomly assigned to a condition in which they had to write for 20 min on 3 days or for 3 min on 1 day a factual description of disclosed traumas, undisclosed traumas, or recent social events. In the case of undisclosed traumatic events, intensive writing about these events showed a beneficial effect on affect and on the affective impact of remembering the event and appraisal. Participants who wrote briefly about an undisclosed traumatic event showed a more negative appraisal. Participants who wrote intensively about a traumatic event and had a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure, measured by a Toronto Alexithymia Scale subscale, showed a positive effect on self-reported measures of affect. Difficulty in describing feelings, an alexythimia dimension, correlated with psychological health problems, emotional inhibition, and a less introspective content of written essays about the emotional events.

Potential benefits of expressive writing for male college students with varying degrees of restrictive emotionality.

“…With the exception of expression of emotional intimacy, the expressive writing intervention also produced roughly equivalent results for high versus low restrictive emotionality men. These results stand in contrast to previous expressive writing studies (e.g., Paez et al, 1999;Solano et al, 2003) indicating that individuals who have difficulty being emotionally open benefit more from expressive writing. The reliance on self-report measures might have hampered the detection of interaction effects.…”

“…In discussing the interaction effects, the authors argued that highly alexithymic patients derived greater benefits because expressive writing might have activated previously unavailable emotional resources in them. In another study (Paez et al, 1999), participants with higher scores on the Difficulty Describing Feelings subscale of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby et al, 1994) and who wrote about traumatic experiences reported significantly less negative affect two months after the writing intervention compared to the control group, whereas this pattern was not repeated for those with less self-reported difficulty describing feelings. The Paez et al (1999) study is particularly relevant to the present study because in a recent analysis of men's emotional inexpressiveness, men's difficulty describing feelings was found to be strongly related to men's restrictive emotionality (Wong et al, 2006).…”

“…In another study (Paez et al, 1999), participants with higher scores on the Difficulty Describing Feelings subscale of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby et al, 1994) and who wrote about traumatic experiences reported significantly less negative affect two months after the writing intervention compared to the control group, whereas this pattern was not repeated for those with less self-reported difficulty describing feelings. The Paez et al (1999) study is particularly relevant to the present study because in a recent analysis of men's emotional inexpressiveness, men's difficulty describing feelings was found to be strongly related to men's restrictive emotionality (Wong et al, 2006). In addition, a factor analysis of several emotion-related variables revealed that difficulty describing feelings and restrictive emotionality formed part of a higher-order construct that tapped into men's difficulty communicating emotions in interpersonal contexts (Wong et al, 2006).…”

“…A recent but growing body of research indicate that people's cognitive, emotional, and social processes can be empirically analyzed by counting and categorizing the written words they use (for reviews, see Pennebaker & King, 1999;Pennebaker et al, 2003 Finally, this study might be the first expressive writing study to examine a masculinity-related variable, i.e., men's restrictive emotionality, as a potential moderator between the writing condition and the outcome variables. Based on the previous review of studies indicating that expressive writing tends to yield greater benefits for individuals with impoverished emotional resources (e.g., Paez et al, 1999), it was predicted that emotionally restricted men would benefit more from expressive writing than less emotionally restricted men.…”

The Assessment of Alexithymia in Medical Settings: Implications for Understanding and Treating Health Problems

“…One found that greater alexithymia (TAS-20 total), and specifically the difficulty describing feelings facet, predicted less postsurgical distress and quicker hospital discharge among patients undergoing bladder papilloma resection who wrote about their feelings of being in the hospital (Solano, Donati, Pecci, Persichetti, & Colaci, 2003). The other study examined only this same TAS-20 facet, difficulty describing feelings, which predicted better affect at follow-up among disclosure writers (Paez, Velasco, & Gonzalez, 1999). In our view, these two studies probably found that the facet of difficulty describing feelings, which is related to inhibition and shame, predicted better outcomes following disclosure.…”