A Study Of Expressive Writing Intervention On Negative Emotions

This study adopted the way of psychological test method and experimentalmethod to explore the expressive writing intervention effect of the negative emotions:depression and anxiety for middle school students.This dissertation investigated randomly1160students of5middle schools inUrumqi. All subjects completed a variety of scales: Adolescent Self Rating LifeEvents Scale, Self-Rating Depression Scale and State-Trait Anxiety Questionnaire.Study1showed the present situation of the middle school students’ life events,depression and anxiety, then explored the relationship between life events anddepression, anxiety.Study2explored the experimental study mode of writing or expressive writing.The study combined the behavioral experiments and tracking measurement method.In the experiments,60middle school students whose scale scores are higher wererandomly assigned to2groups: group of emotional expression, group of emotionaland cognitive processing. Subjects completed the experiments according to theinstructions. Up to six months, one year, one and a half years after this writing, allsubjects completed the above scales once more. By comparing the changes ofindividual depression, anxiety state before different types of writing tasks and after,explored the expressive writing effects on depression and anxiety, analyzed thecharacteristics of different types of writing influence on high school studentsnegative emotions. Try to explore the role of Emotional expression and cognitiveprocessing in expressive writing.The results showed that there is gender difference in depression and anxietyproblem of middle school students, the characteristics of negative emotions is not thesame in different grade. Most subprojects of adolescent life events scale waspositively related significantly with middle school students’ state of depression andanxiety.The results indicated that both Emotional expression writing and emotionalexpression and cognitive processing could effectively improve middle schoolstudents’ negative emotions; the expressive writing intervention for middle schoolstudents has no gender, ethnic differences.The research result showed that the emotional expression in writing is theessential condition in affecting negative emotions. The cognitive process is based onthe emotional expression. The influence of expressive writing to negative emotionswas after expressing their negative emotions, through cognitive processing tore-evaluate the negative event, change the cognition of the negative event to improvethe negative emotions.