Expressive Writing Can Impede Emotional Recovery Following Marital Separation

Abstract

Marital separation and divorce are common life events that increases risk for poor health outcomes, yet few intervention studies explore how to mitigate this increased risk. This study implemented an expressive writing (EW; see Pennebaker, 1997) intervention for adults who experienced a recent marital separation. Ninety participants (32 men) were randomly assigned to and completed one of three experimental writing tasks: traditional EW, a novel (narrative-based) type of EW or control writing. Up to nine months after this writing, participants judged to be actively engaged in a search for meaning concerning their separation reported significantly worse emotional outcomes when assigned to either EW condition relative to control writing. Within the control condition, those participants actively engaged in a search for meaning reported the lowest levels of separation-related disturbance. We discuss these results in terms of the factors that may limit and promote psychological recovery following marital separation.

Impact of Narrative Expressive Writing on Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, and Blood Pressure After Marital Separation

“…Whereas traditional EW focuses on expressing emotions, the narrative EW prompted participants to regulate their emotions during the task with the specific goal of creating a coherent narrative. Although this meaning-making process can result in long-term psychological benefits when recovering from social stressors like divorce (30), there were no differences in psychological distress between either of the EW conditions and the control condition in the original study (8). …”

“…Rye and colleagues (6) created and tested an intervention focused on forgiveness, which increased participants’ wellbeing, lowered their depressive symptoms, and resulted in less trait and state anger (7). More recently, Sbarra and colleagues (8) examined whether expressive writing (EW) would improve participants’ psychological functioning after marital separation, but found no main effect for EW and an iatrogenic effect of EW among participants who reported a high degree of trait-like psychological rumination. However, no prior experimental studies have assessed cardiovascular outcomes among recently-separated adults.…”

“…In the context of risk for poorer physical health following divorce, it is essential to identify whether psychological interventions can alter health-relevant physiology. The current study reanalyzes data from Sbarra and colleagues’ EW intervention study (8), focusing specifically on changes in heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and blood pressure (BP).…”

“…Although EW improves wellbeing for people dealing with stressors (20), such as non-marital breakups (26), Sbarra and colleagues (8) found that EW yielded no main effects and, relative to a control condition, increased separation-related emotional distress among recently-separated people who reported a tendency toward high psychological rumination. In addition to the traditional expressive writing condition, this study developed and implemented a novel, narrative EW condition that was designed to capitalize on prior EW research that found that meaning-making and the creation of a narrative to a stressful event were important elements of improvement due to EW (27-29).…”

“…Sbarra and colleagues’ (8) findings are interesting and clinically-meaningful (suggesting some people get worse when they engage in emotional writing), but they are ultimately incomplete. It is well known that physiology does not always match people’s reported experience (31-32), thus raising the possibility that EW might be inert or even iatrogenic for some people when examining their self-report, while also being potentially beneficial when it comes to mean-level cardiovascular activity over time.…”