Health effects of emotional disclosure in rheumatoid arthritis patients.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of emotional disclosure of stressful events on the pain, physical and affective dysfunction, and joint condition of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Patients were randomly assigned to talk privately about stressful events (disclosure group, n = 36) or about trivial topics (control group, n = 36) for 4 consecutive days. Disclosure resulted in immediate increases in negative mood. At 2 weeks the 2 groups did not differ on any health measure, but at 3 months disclosure patients had less affective disturbance and better physical functioning in daily activities. There was no main effect of disclosure on pain or joint condition, but among the disclosure patients, those who experienced larger increases in negative mood after talking demonstrated improvements in the condition of their joints. This study concludes that, among RA patients, verbal disclosure and emotional processing of stressful life events induces an immediate negative mood followed by improved psychological functioning.

Psychological interventions for rheumatoid arthritis: A meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials

“…Five studies (24,25,27,32,46) also included biofeedback as 1 of the treatment components. Five studies employed more traditional psychotherapeutic interventions, both group based (29,34) and individual (26,47,48), and the intervention in 2 studies (30,43) involved subjects' writing or speaking about difficult emotional or stressful experiences. Length of the interventions varied from 3 days to 9 months with a mean of 9.8 weeks.…”

“…Five of the 25 studies (30,37,41-43) described a proper method of randomization (e.g., table of random numbers, computer generated). Patients were deemed to be blind to the treatment condition in 5 trials (27,30,37,38,43), although as noted earlier, such blinding is typically either not possible or not ethical in many behavioral interventions. Following von Tulder et al (20), in studies that utilized an attention control as the placebo condition, we considered patients to be blind if the researchers performed a treatment credibility analysis and there were no significant differences between the intervention or control group in terms of the participants' assessment of credibility.…”

Effects of day-to-day affect regulation on the pain experience of patients with rheumatoid arthritis

“…Recent studies suggest that the regulation of affect (viz, how one controls the experience and/ or expression of emotion) appears to be important in understanding symptom expression in rheumatoid arthritis (Kelley et al 1997;Smyth et al 1999;van Middendorp et al 2005avan Middendorp et al , 2005b. However, data addressing this topic has been primarily generated from cross-sectional studies that inherently define regulation of affect as relatively constant over time (i.e., a trait).…”

Dealing with a ‘hidden stressor’: emotional disclosure as a coping strategy to overcome the negative effects of motive incongruence on health

“…Thus, it works well for students who struggle to get adjusted to college (Pennebaker, Colder, & Sharp, 1990;Pennebaker & Francis, 1996), for individuals high in fear of failure (Langens & Schüler, 2005), for homeless people (deVicente, Munoz, Perez, & Santos-Olmo, 2004) and for many clinical populations, as for example, patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (e.g. Bernard, Jackson, & Jones, 2006;Sloan, Marx, & Epstein, 2005), roimatoid arthritis (Kelley, Lumley, & Leisen, 1997), chronic pain (Norman, Lumley, Dooley, & Diamond, 2004) or cancer (Zakowski, Ramati, Morton, Johnston, & Flanigan, 2004).…”