Expressive Writing Intervention For Individuals With Different Kind Of Trait Anxiety: The Impact Of Emotion Suppression, Disclosure Of Emotion And Cognitive Guiding

Expressive writing, which has been applied as an paradigm to emotional disclosure, is also known as "written emotional expression" or "written emotional disclosure". The paradigm required the writer to write about traumatic or stressful topic. A great deal of research on expressive writing has proven its contribution to the physical and mental health. The intervention was effective to reduce the negative emotion of anxiety and depression. The study focused on the intervention for the individuals with different kind of trait anxiety, and explored the different of emotion suppression, disclosure of emotion and cognitive guiding in writing. Furthermore, the study has tried to explore the mechanism of writing through text analysis.Study I:An experiment compared the effect of expressive writing intervention to the individuals with different kind of trait anxiety, and explored the impact of suppression and disclosure of emotion in writing. Eighty four participants separated to high-trait anxiety group and low-trait anxiety group by level of trait anxiety, and randomly divided in four writing group:emotional disclosure to anxiety event group, emotional suppression to anxiety event group, cognitive guiding to anxiety event group and the control group. The participants were asked to write once a day,20 min on each 3 consecutive days. A posttest was arranged on the 7th day after the first writing, a tracking test was arranged on the 15th day after the first writing. The results showed that emotional disclosure writing can significantly reduce the level of state anxiety of individuals with low-trait anxiety, and emotional suppression writing can significantly reduce the level of state anxiety and trait anxiety of individuals with high-trait anxiety.Study II:We analyzed the texts which were written by the participants in study I by "TextMind" software, and compared the emotion words and cognitive mechanism words. The results showed that the participants in 3 experimental groups expressed more emotion words and cognitive mechanism words than control group; for the individuals with high-trait anxiety, cognitive guiding group expressed more cause words than any other group; for the individuals with low-trait anxiety, emotional disclosure group expressed more negative emotion words; in all four topics, the individuals with low-trait anxiety expressed more anxiety words than the individuals with high-trait anxiety.