Do gains in working memory capacity explain the written self-disclosure effect?

Abstract

Klein and Boals (2001) concluded that expressive writing about negative life events improves health by reducing intrusive thoughts, as measured by the Impact of Events Scale (IES), and thus freeing working memory (WM) capacity. We replicated their WM gain and rejected the possibility that it reflected task practice alone. We extended their work by showing that such WM effects and reductions in self-reported health symptoms can be observed within a short time frame of a week in a normal population of college students and can occur without reductions in IES scores. Two alternative explanations are discussed of how WM gains can be observed in the written self-disclosure effect without reductions in the frequency of intrusive thoughts and avoidance attempts.

Keywords:

• Self-disclosure
• Working memory
• Expressive writing
• Intrusive thoughts
• Health

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Eva Gilboa-Schectman and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. We appreciated their suggestions.