Gender Schemas, Gender Roles, and Expressive Writing: Toward a Process-focused Model

Range and Jenkins (2010) timely and compelling review of Pennebaker’s (1989, 1993) Expressive Writing Paradigm (EWP) provides a valuable framework for conceptualizing the role of gender-related variables in EWP studies, and for examining these variables in the context of gender schema theory, social role theory, and gender socialization theory. This comment contributes to Range and Jenkins efforts by integrating their analysis with: 1) findings regarding multimodal assessment of individual differences and outcomes; and 2) process-focused studies of participants’ responses to different psychological assessment tools. When multimodal assessment procedures are coupled with experimental manipulations that differentially impact different measures, researchers’ understanding of the benefits of trauma writing will increase and the efficacy of disclosure interventions in applied settings will be enhanced.