Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 300

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Putting Stress into Words: The Impact of Writing on Physiological, Absentee, and Self-Reported Emotional Well-Being Measures

Francis, Martha E., Pennebaker, James W.·1992·American Journal of Health Promotion
DOI 10.4278/0890-1171-6.4.280
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Background and Purpose.: Inhibiting or holding back one's thoughts, feelings, or behaviors is associated with long-term stress and disease. Actively confronting upsetting experiences can reduce the negative effects of inhibition. The present study describes a unique approach to aid individuals in dealing with psychological and emotional issues that they must often face. Methods.: Forty-one of the 81 university employees who were participating in a wellness program agreed to participate in the present study. Subjects were randomly assigned to write about either personal traumatic experiences (n = 23) or non-traumatic topics (n = 18) for 20 minutes once a week for four consecutive weeks. Results.: Results indicate that individuals who wrote about upsetting personal experiences evidenced significant drops in selected blood measures compared to those who wrote about non-traumatic topics (e.g., for SGOT: 4.0% drop among traumatic topic group versus 13.1% increase among non-traumatic topic group, ANOVA p = .029; for SGPT: 24.5% drop versus 7.7% increase, p =. 001). During the month of writing, traumatic topic group subjects evidenced a 28.6% reduction in absentee rates from work relative to the eight months before the experiment compared with a 48.5% increase in absentee rates among non-traumatic topic subjects (p =. 04). Subjects low in emotional inhibition evidenced the greatest reductions in absentee rates following personal disclosure compared to those high in emotional inhibition (p = .011). Discussion.: The proposed writing strategy offers a unique tool for health promotion practitioners. Individuals encouraged to let themselves go and confront traumatic experiences in their lives can potentially enhance their own health.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.4278/0890-1171-6.4.280

Cites

1 of 1 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 1 references

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Francis, M. E., & Pennebaker, J. W.
Venue
American Journal of Health Promotion
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
1992-03
Volume
6
Issue
4
Pages
280-287
ISSN
  • 0890-1171 (ISSN-L)
  • 2168-6602
DOI
10.4278/0890-1171-6.4.280
OpenAlex
W2008597615
Cited by
300
References
1
FWCI
3.33
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.