Emotional engagement in expressive writing

Abstract

Abstract 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.