Women's experiences of the therapeutic value of writing about pregnancy sickness

Background

There is evidence of the beneficial effects of writing therapy in relation to a range of disorders. This is the first study to evaluate those effects in the field of pregnancy sickness.

Aim

To analyse the experiences of women using writing therapy to address issues associated with pregnancy sickness.

Method

Ten women with an age range of 32–48 years participated in this research study. All had been hospitalised at least once with severe pregnancy sickness symptoms in the form of hyperemesis gravidarum. Participants were invited to write reflectively about their former pregnancy sickness, at home, and then take part in a qualitative, semi‐structured telephone interview of approximately one hour to talk about how they experienced this writing process.

Findings

Thematic analysis identified several themes relating to the beneficial effects and uses of writing therapy and women's relational need to be heard and supported.

Discussion

This study supports previous findings about the beneficial effects of writing therapy and contributes new knowledge to the field of pregnancy sickness vis‐à‐vis the importance of emotional expression, emotional care and emotional recovery. The findings have important implications for healthcare professional practice.     

Letter Writing: A Creative Tool for School Counselors Working with Adolescents

Letter writing is a therapeutic tool used in many helping professions with many populations. In school counseling, letter writing can be a useful way for school counselors to build relationships and assess student needs. Letter writing may appeal to students who are more introspective and prefer less direct forms of communication (France, Cadieax, & Allen, 1995). Evidence to support school counselors’ use of letter writing with students is underdeveloped. Citing conceptual, empirical, and theoretical support, the authors propose prompting students to write Letters About Themselves (LAT) at the beginning, middle, and end phases of the school year. Considerations for school counselors using letter writing with adolescents are explored.     

Embodied Self-Care: Enhancing Awareness and Acceptance Through Mindfulness-Oriented Expressive Writing Self-Disclosure

Self-care is fundamental to mental health practitioner training and professional efficacy. Expressive writing about stressful events has been researched and shown to have positive physical and psychological effects. Mindfulness, an embodied approach to clinical practice and education, has also been studied and documented as an effective self-care approach. Embodied education integrates experiential history with current learning, which may influence future practitioner performance and client outcomes. This self-care exercise is designed to promote awareness and acceptance among counselors and counselors-in-training, as well as among clients, through use of a mindfulness-oriented written self-disclosure task that may facilitate meaning-making and may enhance psychological well-being and therapeutic efficacy. It aligns with Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs and American Counseling Association Code of Ethics standards addressing counselor self-care as a necessary facet of ethical practice.     

Reflective writing: I wouldn’t start from here – examining a professional development initiative to enhance the scholarly activity of English HE in FE lecturers

This paper explores the nature of reflective writing through the experience of the researchers in running a series of writing workshops with a group of higher education practitioners working in a UK further education college. The focus here is on reflective writing, which was chosen to start the sequence of workshops, as it was perceived as a form of writing with which the participants would be familiar, given its role in the education and development of teachers within the sector. Our assumption was that this familiarity would facilitate the writing process and participants would readily respond by engaging in reflective writing. However, in practice this proved not to be the case, despite being introduced to a variety of different forms of writing over a series of workshops, it took the participants longer than we expected to begin to write. This led us to question our assumptions about the starting point for the writing workshops and what they might achieve. The paper draws on field notes made during the writing initiative and data gathered through focus groups and interviews with the participants, as well as extracts of their writing to examine their experiences. Different conceptualisations of reflective writing are identified and their implications are explored in relation to the participants’ engagement with writing and their experience of professional development.     

Resource diary: A positive writing intervention for promoting well-being and preventing depression in adolescence

Depression in adolescence is a widespread problem and leads to extensive psychosocial impairments. For these reason, a resource diary has been developed as a four-week positive writing intervention. The aims of this intervention were to enhance well-being, to promote emotion regulation and resource realization, as well as to prevent symptoms of depression in adolescence. Seventy-seven students of 8th form were randomized either to a positive writing group (n = 38) or to a neutral writing group (n = 39). At the post-test, the positive writing group showed a lower dysphoric mood, fewer worries and less rumination in comparison with the neutral writing group. No effects on resource realization were detected. This study provides the first evidence of the beneficial effects of positive writing on indicators of well-being and depressive symptoms. In conclusion, the resource diary represents an economical intervention for preventing depression in adolescence.     

Examining explanatory mechanisms of positive and expressive writing: Towards a resource-oriented perspective

This study tested the hypothesis that benefits of positive and expressive writing accrue when the intervention matches or activates the participant’s personal resources. Students were randomly assigned to keep a newly developed resource diary (RD, n = 114), which asked the participants to write about positive experiences and personal resources, or an expressive writing diary (ED, n = 114), which asked the participants to engage with negative emotional experiences, at home on three consecutive days per week for four weeks. Participants keeping the RD perceived significantly more social support and reported a significantly better mood at post-test than participants keeping the ED. Compared to a control group (n = 81) treatment effects of both writing interventions were higher for participants with lower pre-test values of well-being and brooding as well as for participants who wrote in an ‘atmosphere of activated resources.’ It is suggested that research should move away from testing deficit-compensating hypotheses towards a stronger resource orientation.     

Expressing embarrassment (or not): Which effects on produced impression on others and on attributed social value?

IntroductionEmbarrassment is a negative but prosocial emotion, which often arises from the transgression of a social norm. Its expression thus plays a crucial role in the social perception.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to document this role during both ordinary and extra-ordinary situations (i.e., with stakes).MethodUsing scenarios’ method, 27 participants and 100 recruiters evaluated persons expressing embarrassment or not.ResultsStudy 1 showed that during ordinary situations, nonverbal expression of embarrassment led to make a good impression by signalling desire of appeasement and prosociality. In contrast, Study 2 revealed that during a job interview, verbal expression of embarrassment through defensive tactics was rather negatively perceived.ConclusionThe manipulation of emotions as emotive communication tools will be discussed.     

写作心理学理论研究概况

当今写作心理研究的重点已从写作作品的研究转向写作过程的研究,主要有三种观点表达观点,社会观点和认知观点.Hayes和Flower建构的写作模型(1980,1996)是最有影响的写作模型,为写作心理的研究提供了理论框架.写作心理研究随着研究方法的提高,将会取得更大的进步.     

Improving argumentative writing skills: Effect of two types of aids

Young children have difficulties writing argumentative texts which contain well-linked arguments and counterarguments even though they are capable of arguing by oral. Two main explanations have been provided to account for those difficulties: a) The writer has to manage alone two different points of view, whereas each of the two (or more) speakers can take charge of one of the points of view. b) The inability of young children to attribute an argumentative valence to statements.In order to improve the ability of 8-year-old writers (skilled or less skilled) to manage the dialogical dimension of the argumentative text, two types of aids were tested. 1) A collaborative writing in which the children worked in twos to recompose an experimental argumentation. 2) A classification task was presented before the text recomposition task. The results show that 8-year-old children are capable of processing the argumentative valence of statements. However, only skilled writers take advantage of the two types of aids to compose a text comparable to the standard argumentative schema.