The Words to Tell their Own Pain: Linguistic Markers of Cognitive Reappraisal in Mediating Benefits of Expressive Writing

Writing about a past traumatic experience has been repeatedly associated with improvements in health and psychological wellbeing. According to the cognitive changing theory, one explanation of these beneficial effects is the process of the active reappraisal of the event, marked by changes in cognitive linguistic indicators. An experiment examined the benefits of changes in words expressing cognitive reappraisal on levels of anxiety, as a proxy of stress. Seventy undergraduates, randomly divided in experimental and control groups, wrote about a past painful event or a neutral topic. In a longitudinal design, measures of anxiety were assessed before the writing sessions and four months afterwards. Findings confirm that expressive writing has positive effect on anxiety after a four-month-long follow-up period, showing a mediational role of the increasing use of the cognitive mechanism words in such beneficial effects.