The durability of beneficial health effects associated with expressive writing

Abstract

This study examined the durability of benefits associated with expressive writing. Sixty-eight college undergraduates completed measures of physical and psychological health at the beginning of their first year and were then randomized to either an expressive writing or a control writing condition. Changes in physical health, psychological health (i.e., depression, stress, and anxiety), and academic performance were assessed two, four, and six months later. Findings indicated that participants assigned to the expressive writing condition reported less depression symptom severity at the two-month follow-up assessment relative to participants assigned to the control condition. However, these symptom reductions were not observed at any of the subsequent follow-up assessments. No significant changes were reported for physical health complaints, stress symptoms, anxiety symptoms, or academic performance. These findings suggest that, among first-year college students, expressive writing may provide some short-term relief for certain symptoms.     

Influence of Speed and Accuracy Constraints on Motor Learning for a Trajectory-Based Movement

This study investigated the influences of task constraint on motor learning for a trajectory-based movement considering the speed–accuracy relationship. In the experiment, participants practiced trajectory-based movements for five consecutive days. The participants were engaged in training with time-minimization or time-matching constraints. The results demonstrated that the speed–accuracy tradeoff was not apparent or was weak in the training situation. When the participants practiced the movement with a time-minimization constraint, movement errors did not vary, whereas the movement time decreased. With the time-matching constraint, the errors decreased as a session proceeded. These results were discussed in terms of the combination of signal-dependent noises and exploratory search noises. It is suggested that updating spatial and temporal factors does not appear to occur simultaneously in motor learning.     

The effects of creative,expressive, and reflective writing on career learning: An explorative study

This study investigates whether creative, expressive, and reflective writing contributes to the formation of a work-life narrative that offers both meaning and direction among students in higher education. The content of writing done by students who participated in a two-day writing course at the start (or in preparation) of their work placements and of a control group who did not take part in the course were compared. Writing samples were analysed using the Linguistic Index Word Count program (Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) and an instrument based on Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010). Results show writing promotes the development of career narratives.     

Pure agraphia in Romaji after left inferior frontal gyrus infarction: A case of selective deficit in syllable-to-grapheme conversion in Japanese

The Japanese writing system employs two distinct categories of characters: Kana and Kanji. The difference between Kana and Kanji writing corresponds roughly to that between phonological and lexical systems in Western languages. When typing, most Japanese use alphabetical characters based purely on phonological rules. In particular, the Romaji system is used, in which a syllable consists of a single vowel, a consonant–vowel compound (e.g., ka, ki), or a sequence of consonant–y(semivowel)–vowel (e.g., kya, kyu). We describe a right-handed Japanese patient who developed pure agraphia that affected Romaji writing but preserved Kana and Kanji writing and who had a lesion in the left pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus that extended to the anterior precentral gyrus. The patient demonstrated literal paragraphia in spelling Romaji across modalities. Our findings suggested that the patient’s agraphia in Romaji after a confined left frontal infarction was manifested by a selective impairment in syllable-to-grapheme conversion.     

Ripples in mental space caused by dark matters and twisted tales: Some reflections on memory,memoirs and therapeutic work

In this paper, the author reflects on the issues of memory and the writing of personal memoirs, and how this impinges on our professional work. Her title is drawn in part from the work of theoretical physicists who can hypothesise about the existence of dark matter by measuring the deformations it causes in surrounding stars and galaxies. What she suggests is that there may be limitations in keeping strictly to disciplinary boundaries, and our professional lives may defy our efforts to box them in. The opening of doors to a more extensive world of ideas is often helpful, both for psychoanalysis and for the fields which it can illuminate and by which it can also be illuminated. She uses the example of the publication and critical reception of her own memoir, Pieces of Molly to make links with our professional selves and our clinical work. She draws on the work of Freud, and other seminal thinkers in the field, as well as her own clinical work to illustrate the ways in which mental space and the memories within it can be contained and transformed over time, but also can be beset by both internal and external saboteurs.     

The Embrace of Radical Philosophical Emptiness as a Liberating Conceptualization of Thought in Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard

Among the challenges of poststructuralist thought has been the demand that we acknowledge a kind of philosophical emptiness which many feel accompanies the perceived decline in foundationalist thought. By looking more closely at Barthes and Baudrillard＇s writing on meaning, writing, language, truth, and the real, we can come to a better understanding of the emergence and implications of the poststructural challenge. The paper argues that Barthes＇ and Baudrillard＇s writing on these five key concepts can lead us to a more liberating conception of thought and contribute to our individual effort to become more challenging thinkers. This paper also （unavoidably） points to several points of convergence and divergence between Barthes and Baudrillard.     

Letter writing as a reflective practice: understanding the shuffling,shifting, and shaping of a researcher identity

This article presents letter writing as a form of arts-based inquiry and reflective practice. The author argues that letter writing can be employed to develop a reflective space for autobiographical reflection. The letter featured here captures and demonstrates the shuffling, shifting, and shaping processes of the author’s researcher identity through letter writing, and is informed by the theoretical underpinnings of reflective practice. It records and investigates the experiences that the author underwent during a compulsory course in the first year of a doctoral program at a North American university. Three interrelated themes are identified in the letter: the researcher identity in crisis, the nature of research, and future researcher identity. It is concluded that letter writing can facilitate the self-evolution, self-introspection, self-awareness, and identity change that emerges with, and through, reflection. Letter writing as a reflective practice offers the benefits of developing self-knowledge, independent thought, critical thinking, and deconstructive understanding of one’s experiences.     

Exploring the personal and social context of female youth sex offenders

This study explored the personal and social context of young female sex offenders, probing their risk profiles for prospective treatment interventions. A convenience sample of eight young South African female sexual offenders participated in the study (black = 88%, Indian = 12%, age range = 14–20 years). They completed semi-structured interviews on their perceptions of the influences to commit a sexual offence. The data were thematically analysed. Emergent themes on factors associated with sexual offending included: peer influence, poor child monitoring, parental neglect, unproductive sexual health education, as well as insight into the participants’ maladaptive beliefs and distorted thinking.     

Squaring the round: An unusual progressive graphomotor impairment with post‐mortem findings

Investigations of neurodegenerative disorders may reveal functional relationships in the cognitive system. C.S. was a 63‐year‐old right‐handed man with post‐mortem confirmed Pick's disease with a range of progressive impairments including non‐fluent aphasia, speech, limb, oculomotor, and buccofacial apraxia, but mostly intact intelligence, perception, orientation, memory, semantics, and phonology. During progression, agrammatism in writing with impairments in syntactic comprehension emerged in parallel with an unusual graphomotor deficit in drawing and writing, with an increasing deterioration of graphic short‐term memory. We investigated C.S.'s graphomotor deficit longitudinally using tests of writing and drawing on letters, words, and sentences and drawing to command and copying. We also tested C.S.'s short‐term graphemic buffer experimentally. Analysis showed deficits on selective aspects of graphomotor implementation of writing and drawing, mainly affecting the production of circles and curves, but not short straight lines in drawing and writing, and graphomotor short‐term memory, which paralleled impairments of written syntax and syntactic comprehension. We believe this to be the first detailed analysis of such an unusual progressive impairment in graphomotor production, which may be related to problems with agrammatic agraphia and impairments affecting shared components of cognition reflecting damage to shared neural networks. Alternatively, they may simply reflect the effects of coincidental damage to separate mechanisms responsible for aspects of writing, drawing, and syntactic processing. Longitudinal investigations of emerging deficits in progressive conditions like C.S.'s provides an opportunity to examine the progressive emergence of symptoms in an individual with multiple progressive impairments as they appear and examine putative relationships between them.     

大学生外语写作自我效能感在写作焦虑对写作成绩影响中的中介效应

在外语写作课堂教学的情境下,使用写作自我效能感量表、外语写作焦虑量表和一篇英语命题作文分别调查356名大学一年级学生的外语写作自我效能感、写作焦虑与外语写作成绩,探讨写作自我效能感在写作焦虑与写作成绩之间的中介效应。结果表明:(1)外语写作焦虑显著负向预测外语写作自我效能感;(2)外语写作自我效能感显著正向预测外语写作成绩;(3)外语写作自我效能感在外语写作焦虑对外语写作成绩的影响中起到了完全中介的作用。