Emotional engagement in expressive writing: Clinical and discursive perspectives

Sabo Mordechay, Daphna; Eviatar, Zohar; Nir, Bracha

doi:10.1075/ni.20051.sab

Article published In:

Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 34:1 (2024) ► pp.191–223

Emotional engagement in expressive writing

Clinical and discursive perspectives

Daphna Sabo Mordechay | University of Haifa

Zohar Eviatar | University of Haifa

Bracha Nir | University of Haifa

HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrating a difficult event into one’s life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and examine whether good EW outcome cases (in terms of well-being improvement) would be characterized with different types of narratives than poor outcome cases. Results show that texts produced by good outcome cases presented more emotional involvement than poor cases. Furthermore, good cases presented with a more complex and well-integrated narrative of their story than poor cases. It is suggested that good outcome participants’ writings are more emotionally involved, integrated and personal. Our findings emphasize the importance of context-sensitive and function-oriented accounts of EW texts.

Keywords: expressive writing, narrative research, life story research, discourse analysis, well-being

Article outline

Introduction
Method
- Participants
- Measures
  - Writing task
  - Measures of well-being
    - Brief Symptom Inventory
    - Impact of events scale
  - Coding for holistic content
    - ‘Integrative writing’ [IW] type
    - ‘Focus on the negative’ [FN] type
    - ‘Deny the negative’ [DN] type
  - Coding for abstract content
    - Non-evaluative clauses
    - Evaluative clauses
- Procedure
Results
- Holistic content analysis
  - Text examples of the holistic content analysis
    - Text examples of IW
    - Text examples of FN
    - Text examples of DN
- Abstract content analysis
- Combined content analysis
Discussion
Declaration of interest statement
Acknowledgements
Notes
References

Published online: 12 July 2021

https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20051.sab

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