The Language of Psychological Change: Decoding an Expressive Writing Paradigm

This study uses linguistic analysis to investigate psychological changes associated with an emotion regulation strategy integrating psychological acceptance and positive reappraisal, as compared to two established strategies. Two hundred and sixty-nine undergraduate participants wrote for 4 consecutive days, 20 minutes each day, about the biggest problem in their lives and were randomly assigned to use one of three emotion regulation strategies: (a) acceptance + positive reappraisal, (2) emotional disclosure, or (3) positive reappraisal. Linguistic analyses were conducted to examine changes in attentional focus and insightful and causal thinking in the writings. Results indicated that participants who integrated acceptance and positive reappraisal wrote less about the past and more about the future, and used more insight words, over the course of writing relative to the other two conditions. In addition, they used a decreasing amount of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., "I") and increased more in their use of first-person plural pronouns (e.g., "we"). Implications of these language findings for understanding underlying psychological changes are discussed.