Everyone has a spiritual dark box, which stores a variety of emotions and emotions, which are invisible but truly affect our physical and mental health.
Until Sigmund Freud tried to use the key of psychoanalysis to open the secret box of the soul. Psychologists woke up from a dream and devoted themselves to exploring the inner world of the visitors.
Whether it is psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral or humanism , they all affirm the central role of the expression of specific experiences and emotions in the psychotherapy process. From Freud's "talk therapy", free association is proposed to encourage people to recall repressed events and emotions as much as possible, so that the treatment can be effective through subconscious awareness.
From the "self-disclosure" proposed by humanistic psychologist Sidney Jullard and related research, it is believed that a person's ability to sincerely share his personal and secret thoughts and feelings with others will contribute to the individual's physical and mental health.
If the main task of psychotherapy is to elicit suppressed or repressed experiences or emotions, in addition to oral communication, written expression can also achieve the purpose of healing.
In the late 1980s, narrative therapy became popular, and "writing therapy" and "reading therapy" gained momentum, joining the torrent of psychotherapy and counseling, and were included in new research perspectives.
"Writing therapy" has gradually emerged in local research in China in recent years. The concept of traditional Chinese culture has contributed to it. In the way of "expression", whether it is language or behavior, the Chinese value euphemism and implicitness.
Appreciate the artistic conception of a winding path that leads to a quiet place, but lack the acceptance and application of straightforwardness. Written writing has become a way of expression for people to feel safe, and it has also become an effective way for psychological counselors to encourage clients to express themselves.
At the same time, as people's education level generally improves, written language has become a common method of communication, and writing is increasingly likely to become a tool for psychotherapy.
However, the form of writing has undergone tremendous changes with the prevalence of the Internet, and people's expression methods have also changed, from traditional paper-and-pen writing to online blogs, Weibo writing, WeChat mutual comments, written expressions, from all-involved emotional expressions to casual interactions like likes.
This series of changes has brought many new questions to the research on "writing therapy". Are the traditional research results still applicable in the rapidly changing era? Does people's high frequency of expression affect the quality of people's thinking? In the process of psychological consultation and counseling, can fragmentary and shallow writing expressions play a healing role in words?
As the audience of higher education , college students have a relatively high level of use and expression of words, and are more active in accepting emerging media and using network tools. At the same time, among this group, freshmen who have just entered the university campus are overwhelmed with many problems such as schoolwork, environment, and future.
Survey research by Zhao Fucai and Yang Zhaoning shows that most freshmen have a relatively slow adaptation process to college life, which is usually completed within two to four months. Some students will maladapt to life and the environment, causing anxiety problems.
For the anxiety problems of college freshmen, there are mainly individual and group CBT therapies, supportive group therapy, psychodrama, etc. Among them, there are many studies on the effectiveness of cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy. In contrast, there are few studies on the effectiveness of writing therapy on anxiety problems. The
article will focus on the research on expressive writing and the impact of the level of emotional involvement in expressive writing on the anxiety of college freshmen. The purpose of the research is to: 1. Apply expressive writing therapy to the improvement of anxiety among college freshmen. 2. Explore the role of the level of emotional involvement in the process of expressive writing on anxiety. The
study attempts to infer the influencing factors of writing effectiveness through detailed analysis of three cases. The three students had different expression content and methods. Compared with the pre-test, the anxiety changes of the three students were different when measured one month later.Student
A’s description focused on learning, interpersonal relationships, and money views, which promoted physical and mental health and was conducive to reducing anxiety. Student B wrote about three things three times mainly from an interpersonal perspective. During the expression process, negative emotions decreased and positive emotions increased. There was no significant change in anxiety one month later.
C student repeatedly described the feeling of being unable to adapt to college life around study and self-perception, but his anxiety scores increased in the follow-up measurement one month later. By analyzing and comparing the writing content of the three, we subjectively infer that the following reasons may be related to the difference in effects.
1. Writing effect is related to emotional changes.
A student’s negative emotions dropped significantly, with his score dropping from 41 points to 22 points. One month later, the anxiety was significantly improved in the measurement. However, the negative emotions of students B and C did not change significantly, the score difference was about 5 points, and their anxiety did not improve significantly after one month.
The score of negative emotion can partially explain the degree of emotional activation, and the degree of emotional activation and arousal is an important factor affecting the writing effect. In the study, the impact of the level of emotional involvement on the intervention effect was verified by changing the writing method. This result is consistent with the individual cases.
2. Writing effect is related to cognitive processing
Cognitive processing in the writing process has an important impact on writing effect. Some studies have shown that compared with the emotional expression only group and the emotional expression combined with cognitive processing writing group, the latter's writing effect is better. This is reflected in the three cases in the
study. In the three cases, negative emotions were fully activated and awakened, but the final writing effects of the three were different. After
A students expressed their negative emotions, they carried out a process of self-reflection and gained insight and understanding of negative events, which was reflected in thinking about the cause and effect of the events and dialectical understanding.
For example, in the first writing, student A used 11 "whys" to express his anger and helplessness regarding interpersonal relationships. In the second writing of
, "I don't like going out with them, maybe because I am worried about spending money." From the fact that "I don't have good friends" to accusing the other party of "she always talks endlessly" to "maybe she is worried about spending money", I progressively analyze the real reasons why I don't like to interact with others, and the beliefs behind my behaviors in interpersonal communication.
wrote for the third time "preparing to go out with ***, a little happy and a little excited", and his behavior was completely different from the state presented in the first writing. This cognitive process is controlled autonomously, and if core beliefs can be further explored with the help of a counselor, long-term results may be better.
In contrast, student B described the incident and his own feelings in detail. Throughout the article, he did not have a deep understanding of self-reflection and the significance of the incident.
During the writing process, the release of emotions is conducive to the reduction of negative emotions, and is also conducive to increasing the tolerance of negative emotions. For example, when "homesickness" was mentioned in the first writing, all the negative emotions about homesickness exploded.
The second time I also wrote "homesick" and raised the expectation of going home, the positive emotions increased significantly, but the anxiety level measured one month later had almost no change. Some studies have shown that the reason for the effective improvement of writing about positive experiences is the induction of positive emotions.
However, some researchers believe that writing about positive events will prompt subjects to analyze and deconstruct the event, so that the positive event no longer looks positive, so it may have adverse effects. Therefore, a brief increase in positive emotions may not be enough to cause changes in subjects' anxiety levels. Student
C repeatedly described his feelings, with a high level of emotional exposure, but did not describe the specific events that triggered the emotion, nor did he think about the meaning of the emotion itself or how to reduce negative emotions.
's emotions were highly aroused and activated during the three writing processes, but that was all. He lacked the source and processing process of emotions, as well as the impact or significance of emotions on himself. He also lacked an objective and correct understanding of the generation, development and subsidence of emotions. This may be the reason why the anxiety level does not decrease but increases.
Therefore, in the guidance of expressive writing, the way of expressing emotions will also affect the effect of writing, so attention should be paid to scientific guidance.
3. Other potential influencing factors on writing effect
The subjects in the case are all representative samples of the high-anxiety group. In order to explore the diversity of writing methods, the participants in the low-anxiety group were asked to participate in writing. Through text analysis of several low-anxiety cases, it was found that the writing methods that may affect the writing effect also include: metacognitive ability, empathy ability, and critical thinking ability.
Metacognition refers to an individual’s awareness of the self-cognition process. The essence of metacognition is the recognition of cognition, which is an individual's self-awareness, self-reflection, self-evaluation and self-regulation of his or her own cognitive processing. When anxiety occurs, individuals with strong metacognitive abilities will detect, reflect and adjust in time.
A large part of college students' anxiety comes from objective factors. The "subjective self" is monitored and observed by the "objective self", which will adjust the gap between subjective cognition and objective existence, adjust cognitive biases, and achieve the purpose of effective management of objective emotions. The control of emotions in turn promotes the solution of real problems.
Empathy refers to the ability to understand the emotions and feelings of others from their perspective. Some researchers have explored the emotional regulation mechanisms of individuals with different empathy abilities, and the results show that individuals with high empathy abilities are more susceptible to negative emotions and have better emotional recovery effects than individuals with low empathy abilities.
Another study shows that college students with high empathy ability have higher ability to experience happiness. In this study, subjects in the low-anxiety writing group showed a high degree of understanding of others, or a more obvious intention to understand the motivations of others' behavior.
On the one hand, empathy means that individuals are more sensitive to the emergence of negative emotions, and their emotions can be adjusted in a timely manner during the writing process. However, individuals with low empathy are relatively slow, which may increase the emotional load on the psychology and produce an obvious sense of anxiety.
On the other hand, empathy prompts individuals to try to understand others' positions and situations, and to make rational explanations for other people's behavior, thereby achieving a certain degree of internal balance and reducing anxiety.
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