Mending Broken Hearts: Effects of Expressive Writing on Mood, Cognitive Processing, Social Adjustment and Health Following a Relationship Breakup

By S. Lepore, Melanie A. Greenberg. Psychology & Health, 2002

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Seventy-two male and 73 female undergraduates were randomly assigned to an experimental group, in which they wrote expressively about a relationship breakup, or to a control group, in which they wrote in a non-emotional manner about impersonal relationship topics. Control participants reported short-term increases in upper respiratory illness (URI) symptoms, tension and fatigue, whereas experimental participants did not. Further, higher levels of intrusive thoughts and avoidance were associated with short-term increases in URI symptoms in the control group, but were unrelated to URI symptoms in the experimental group. Finally, there was a trend ( p <0.06) suggesting that experimental participants were more likely to reunite with their ex-partner than were control participants. These findings indicate that expressive writing has a wide range of social, emotional, and physical health benefits for individuals coping with stressful events, particularly if they are experiencing ongoing intrusive thoughts and avoidance responses related to the stressor.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91944c655c131b104ab5600d0f27b74aedadc9c6

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Citations in the corpus

Making sense of the meaning literature: an integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. (2010, result): “Other studies examining whether participants’ situational or global meaning changed as a result of writing also reported null results (e.g., Lepore & Greenberg, 2002; Lestideau & Lavallee, 2007).”
It's not that bad: Social challenges to emotional disclosure enhance adjustment to stress (2004, background): “…(Kelley et al. , 1997; Pennebaker et al. , 1990; Smyth et al. , 1999; Spera et al. , 1994), fewer reports of illness and physician visits (Lepore and Greenberg, 2002; Pennebaker and Beall, 1986; Pennebaker et al ., 1990), decreased distress (Lepore, 1997), enhanced immune system…”
Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. (2006, unknown): “In the existing literature, there is only one study that has directly compared physically ill and physically healthy treatment participants within a single experimental disclosure study (Levey-Thors, 2000); in this study, physically ill participants were not found to benefit more than healthy partic”
Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing (2005, background): “Limited benefits were obtained for male psychiatric prison inmates (Richards et al, 2000), victims of natural disaster (Smyth et al, 2002) and individuals who had experienced a recent relationship breakup (Lepore & Greenberg, 2002).”