Positive Expressive Writing as a Stress Management Strategy for Japanese Students: Willingness to Engage in Expressive Writing

ABSTRACT

Positive expressive writing may improve willingness to engage in expressive writing. An individual, three-day, homework-style experiment was conducted with 42 Japanese undergraduate students who completed a writing task about their feelings regarding a stressful experience. Participants were assigned sequentially to positive, negative, or standard prompt groups. ANOVAs were performed to compare students’ willingness to engage in expressive writing across groups and revealed a relative increase in the positive prompt group’s willingness from baseline to follow-up. In that group, students’ willingness significantly increased from pre-session to post-session. The positive prompt helped maintain higher levels of continued expressive writing and promoted participants’ willingness to engage in expressive writing, causing fewer interruptions during writing sessions. Expressive writing may be an early stress intervention strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Expressive writing
• willingness to engage in expressive writing
• self-help approach
• recent stress
• stress coping
• creativity in counseling

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Omori for the useful discussions. I would also like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing. I am grateful to the reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

1. In this study, I analyzed a different aspect of the data set referenced in an oral presentation at the 27^th Annual Emotion Psychology Conference (Oishi, 2019) and in a paper presented at the 83^rd Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association (Oishi & Omori, 2019).