Journaling for Health Part 3: The Health Benefits of Narrative

This is part 3  (of 5) of a series on journaling to improve health, or what James W. Pennebaker, the seminal scholar on the topic, calls “expressive writing.”   I’ve been doing research into expressive writing, which has been demonstrated to improve mental and physical health, in order to roll my learnings into an interactive experience currently in development.

In 2002, when Graybeal, Sexton and Pennebaker tested the hypothesis that narrative was the curative mechanism in writing (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999), their results went a little wonky.  They predicted that writing a good story (one with a beginnng, middle and an ending) would bring their authors the most positive health benefits.  However, they weren’t able to match good stories in expressive writing samples with health benefits in their writers.  They concluded that “the psychological correlates of story-making are unknown” (Graybeal, Sexton & Pennebaker, 2002, p. 580).

Results were inconclusive largely because barely anyone participating in the study went to a doctor afterward.  Researchers simply couldn’t say if the sessions had any effect on participants’ health.  Additionally, in measuring the number of participants who did visit their doctors after the study, a slightly higher number of these folks had written essays judged as good stories.  Further, they found that word usage previously thought to be associated with storyness—e.g. causal words like “because” and “reason,” or insight words like “understand” and “realize”—were not associated with the essays judged as good stories.

If the only clear thought in your mind now is, “Huh?” you’re on track with me.

The study did have some curious aspects to its method, though, such as defining a good story as an essay with a beginning, middle and end.  Certainly, the components of a narrative that brings transformational catharsis and resolution must have more going on than this.  Also, doctor visits were only measured for a month after the sessions, which was a much shorter amount of time than other studies’ measurement periods.  Finally, the study asked participants to write about emotional and unemotional topics “in counterbalanced order, separated by five weeks.”  The counterbalancing would seem to neutralize the effects of emotional vs. unemotional writing.  Since it’s emotional writing that has demonstrated health benefits, wouldn’t one wish to compare samples of emotional writing that had good story-making qualities with emotional writings that had poor story-making qualities?

Basically, they didn’t disprove the hypothesis that the creation of narrative contributes to expressive writing’s health benefits.  They simply weren’t able to confirm it.

References:

Graybeal, A; Sexton, J. D.; and Pennebaker, J. W. (2002).  The Role of Story-Making in Disclosure Writing: The Psychometrics of Narrative.  Psychology and Health (Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 571-581).

Pennebaker, J.W.; Seagal, Janel D. (1999). Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative.  Journal of Clinical Psychology (Vol. 55, No. 10, pp.1243-1254).