Expressive Writing (EW) involves writing in an emotionally expressive manner about an experienced event, and has been shown to be related to increases in psychological and physical well-being. The purpose of the current study was to extend previous work by examining how self-presentation affects psychological and physical gains following the EW task. Forty one participants who have experienced a traumatic event were recruited from the community and given either an EW or control activity. Measures assessing self-presentation and various indices of health were administered at baseline and again at one month follow-up to determine changes in symptomatology. Results indicated that higher levels of perfectionistic self-presentation were significantly associated with less improvement in symptoms of depression and posttraumatic stress. Further, a nonsignificant moderation trend emerged whereby higher levels of perfectionistic self-presentation were associated with more improvement in symptoms of depression and posttraumatic stress in the EW group but not control group.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/24556 |
| Date | 22 July 2010 |
| Creators | Danson, Jonathan J. |
| Contributors | Watson, Jeanne |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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