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6 papers
This research found that writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as little as 15 minutes on three separate days was linked to better mental and physical health. The results were seen across ages, genders, cultures, social classes, and personality types. Computer text analysis showed that people…
This article reviews evidence on EMDR for PTSD and explains a theory of how it may work. It states that EMDR is an efficacious and efficient treatment for PTSD and summarizes findings from 20 controlled-outcome studies. The paper presents Shapiro's Adaptive Information Processing model, which says problems arise when distressing…
Writing Therapy (WT) is defined as a process of investigation about personal thoughts and feelings using the act of writing as an instrument, with the aim of promoting self-healing and personal growth. WT has been integrated in specific psychotherapies with the aim of treating specific mental disorders (PTSD, depression, etc.).…
This article offers a new humanities-based theory about how falling seriously ill can affect a person’s quality of life. The authors combine ideas about contingency (the feeling that life could have been different), narrative identity (how people make life stories), and quality of life to explain how people make meaning…
These experiments tested whether telling a story about a sad or angry event helps reduce those feelings. Across studies (n = 93 for sadness; n = 89 for anger), narrating did lower negative emotion, and it worked best when people described the event in the past tense and included positive…
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious and varied mental illness that can follow exposure to a traumatic event. Diagnosis in current systems (DSM-5 and ICD-11) requires that a person experienced a traumatic event. Typical symptoms are reliving fearful memories, a lasting sense of threat, active avoidance, being overly alert…
