Changes in the sexual self-schema of women with a history of childhood sexual abuse following expressive writing treatment.

Abstract

Objective Sexual self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the sexual self that influence the processing of sexually pertinent information and guide sexual behavior. Until recently sexual self-schemas were exclusively assessed with self-report instruments. Recent research using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM), an inductive method of topic modeling, identified seven unique themes of sexual self-schemas: family and development, virginity, abuse, relationship, sexual activity, attraction, and existentialism from essays of 239 women (Stanton, Boyd, Pulverman, & Meston, 2015). In the current study, these themes were used to examine changes in theme prominence after an expressive writing treatment Method Women (N = 138) with a history of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) completed a five-session expressive writing treatment, and essays on sexual self-schemas written at pre-treatment and post-treatment were examined for changes in themes. Results Women showed a reduction in the prominence of the abuse, family and development, virginity, and attraction themes, and an increase in the existentialism theme. Conclusions This study supports the validity of the seven themes identified by Stanton and colleagues (2015) and suggests that expressive writing may aid women with a history of sexual abuse to process their abuse history such that it becomes a less salient aspect of their sexual self-schemas.

Sexual Self-Schemas in the Real World: Investigating the Ecological Validity of Language-Based Markers of Childhood Sexual Abuse

“…15 All OPs were analyzed with LIWC2015, 22 a text analysis program that scores texts along *80 well-validated psychological/cognitive measures 23 ; we investigated only those LIWC dimensions examined in previous work. { Second, we quantified the seven sexual self-schema themes identified in previous work using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) previously described 6,25,26 ; examples of { Importantly, LIWC2015 includes four additional composite measures that were not present in previous versions of the software. Relevant to previous work, one such measure is ''authenticity,'' a measure of language that is related to speaking freely and without filtering.…”

“…Past research has found that changes in sexual self-schemas and cognitions over the course of a clinical intervention are an important marker of treatment success when working with this population. Following a targeted intervention, the sexual self-schemas of women with a history of CSA have been shown to become more similar to those of nonabused women, 26 and these changes were associated with decreases in depression and post traumatic stress disorder symptoms. 30 Indeed, altering maladaptive schemas is a core element of cognitive behavioral therapy.…”

Hablo Inglés y Español: Cultural Self-Schemas as a Function of Language

“…The data is analyzed using an innovative text analytic strategy called the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM; e.g., Chung and Pennebaker, 2008; Boyd, 2015; Stanton et al, 2015; Pulverman et al, 2016). This text analytic approach uses factor analyses to observe how groups of content words cluster together.…”

“…In this study, we address these gaps by analyzing the open-ended self-descriptions of a sample of Mexican-American bilinguals in two different languages at two different moments in time, to tap into intra-individual variability. The data is analyzed using an innovative text analytic strategy called the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM; e.g., Chung and Pennebaker, 2008 ; Boyd, 2015 ; Stanton et al, 2015 ; Pulverman et al, 2016 ). This text analytic approach uses factor analyses to observe how groups of content words cluster together.…”

Text Analysis for Psychology: Methods, Principles, and Practices

“…Support for the word count approach comes from a large, long-standing literature demonstrating the predictive validity and utility of tracking word usage. Associations have been identified between word usage and meaningful psychological constructs such as personality (Carey et al, 2015;Pennebaker & King, 1999;Sumner et al, 2011), mental health (Mergenthaler, 1996;Gottschalk & Gleser, 1979;Coppersmith et al, 2015;Pulverman et al, 2017), gender (Newman et al, 2008), political and moral values (Hogenraad, 2003;Alizadeh et al, 2017;Sagi & Dehghani, 2014;Yaden et al, 2018), performance (Robinson et al, 2013), creativity (Martindale, 2007), culture (DeAndrea et al, 2010;Dehghani et al, 2013;Rodríguez-Arauz et al, 2017), and social events (Cohn et al, 2004).…”