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Cited by 16Mental Health via WritingPosttraumatic Stress Disorder ResearchChild Abuse and Trauma

Verbal Emotional Disclosure of Traumatic Experiences in Adolescents: The Role of Social Risk Factors

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Pérez, Silvia, Peñate, Wenceslao, Bethencourt, Juan M., Fumero, Ascensión·2017·Frontiers in Psychology
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00372PMC PMC5348519
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Abstract

It is well known that traumatic events and adverse life situations are very important in both physical and psychological health. Prevalence studies suggested that adolescents experience at least one potentially traumatic event before reaching age 18. The paradigm of research centered on expressive writing has evidenced the beneficial effects that emotional disclosure of previous traumas produces on physical health and psychological adjustment. The aims of the study are threefold: determining the prevalence of adverse or traumatic events; examining the extent to which psychopathological symptoms developed in those exposed to traumatic events; and exploring an verbal emotional disclosure paradigm in which variations on time spent talking about traumatic experiences to others resulted in a reduction of the psychological impact of trauma in a sample of Spanish adolescents. 422 volunteer adolescents participated, 226 boys and 192 girls, from 10 to 19 years old, all of them living in Tenerife. The mean age was 14.8 years (SD = 1.83). All of them completed the instruments used to assess the psychological impact of traumatic experiences and verbal emotional disclosure. The main results indicated that seventy-seven percent of the participants had suffered a traumatic situation. The participants who have been exposed to traumatic events scored significantly higher in measures of post-traumatic stress, disorder, intrusive thoughts, avoidance behaviors, anxiety and depression, compared to those without trauma. Furthermore, results show a decrease in symptomatology scores as a function of time spent disclosing emotional experiences to others, particularly when disclosure occurred several times. In conclusion, stressful events or traumatic experiences and their concomitant emotional effects are highly prevalent in adolescents, and repeated verbal emotional disclosure to others appears to ameliorate their impact. Verbal emotional disclosure shows greater therapeutic benefits when adolescents repeatedly narrate the experience and in an extensive way.

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  • The more detailed, insightful, and extensive the disclosures are, the less posttraumatic symptoms they are likely to experience and the better their outcomes tend to be.

    “Further, the more detailed, insightful, and extensive the disclosures are, the less posttraumatic symptoms they are likely to experience and the better their outcomes tend to be, demonstrating the utility of trauma-related disclosure for facilitating trauma processing (Pennebaker et al., 1997;Pérez et al., 2017;Ullman & Filipas, 2005).”

    From Feeling pressured to talk about trauma: How pressure to disclose alters the association between trauma disclosure and posttraumatic growth (2023) · cites this paper as Pérez et al., 2017

    The Results and Discussion (pages not provided) report that adolescents who disclosed traumatic experiences more extensively or on several occasions tended to have lower symptom scores, including PTSD symptoms. Those differences were not statistically significant, and the study assessed time and frequency of disclosure, not how detailed or insightful it was. The claim therefore goes beyond what this source establishes. (LLM, conf=0.88)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Pérez, S., Peñate, W., Bethencourt, J. M., & Fumero, A.
Affiliations
Universidad de La Laguna (ES)
Corresponding author
Fumero, Ascensión
ORCID
Venue
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2017-03-14
Volume
8
Pages
372-372
ISSN
1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00372
PMC
PMC5348519
OpenAlex
W2597218440
Cited by
16
References
6
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2
FWCI
1.57
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
Keywords
traumatic events, adolescents, social risk factors, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatric symptoms, anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, avoidance, expressive writing, disclosure frequency, life events

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