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Many pre-service teachers suffer from mathematics anxiety, which hinders their mathematics learning. This can cause a deficit in their mathematics content knowledge, which must be addressed to become effective mathematics teachers. The present study explored whether positive expressive writing was better at mitigating pre-service teachers’ mathematics anxiety than general expressive writing. Expressive writing is emotional writing, which was shown to be successful in medical fields to reduce anxiety and more recently in the field of education. In contrast, research on positive expressive writing has recently shown beneficial results for treating test anxiety. Therefore, the potential for positive expressive writing in reducing mathematics anxiety was examined in this mixed methods study involving 27 pre-service teachers enrolled in a hybrid (i.e., half of the instructional time was in-person, while the other half was online) mathematics for teachers course. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing groups (positive expressive, expressive, and neutral) and completed pre- and post- measures of mathematics anxiety using the abbreviated mathematics anxiety rating scale at time 1 (beginning of course), time 2 (mid-term examination), and time 3 (final examination). In addition, participants completed a measure of their mathematics ability at the beginning of the course and then proceeded to engage in the three types of writing at the beginning of each of the nine consecutive classes. Although results did not show a significant difference between the three writing groups (positive, expressive, and neutral) and mathematics anxiety, there was a significant relationship between pre-service teachers’ mathematical ability and measure of mathematics anxiety taken at the mid-term examination. This strong negative relationship demonstrated that pre-service teachers with low mathematics ability have high mathematics anxiety. Valuable insights were gained into mathematics anxiety effects on pre-service teachers, as well as contextual factors in terms of writing.

The 1997 Psychological Science paper “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process” summarized the results of several expressive writing studies. Since the publication of the first expressive writing study in 1986, a number of discoveries had emerged that had both theoretical and clinical implications. The scientific and personal backstories of the research are discussed. Finally, several possible reasons are advanced to explain why this particular paper has been cited as much as it has.

Writing Therapy (WT) is defined as a process of investigation about personal thoughts and feelings using the act of writing as an instrument, with the aim of promoting self-healing and personal growth. WT has been integrated in specific psychotherapies with the aim of treating specific mental disorders (PTSD, depression, etc.). More recently, WT has been included in several Positive Interventions (PI) as a useful tool to promote psychological well-being. This narrative review was conducted by searching on scientific databases and analyzing essential studies, academic books and journal articles where writing therapy was applied. The aim of this review is to describe and summarize the use of WT across various psychotherapies, from the traditional applications as expressive writing, or guided autobiography, to the phenomenological-existential approach (Logotherapy) and, more recently, to the use of WT within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Finally, the novel applications of writing techniques from a positive psychology perspective will be analyzed. Accordingly, the applications of WT for promoting forgiveness, gratitude, wisdom and other positive dimensions will be illustrated. The results of this review show that WT yield therapeutic effects on symptoms and distress, but it also promotes psychological well-being. The use of writing can be a standalone treatment or it can be easily integrated as supplement in other therapeutic approaches. This review might help clinician and counsellors to apply the simple instrument of writing to promote insight, healing and well-being in clients, according to their specific clinical needs and therapeutic goals.

Expressive writing about a traumatic event is promising in treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in adult trauma survivors. To date, the comparative efficacy and acceptability of this approach is uncertain. Therefore, we aimed to examine the comparative efficacy and acceptability of expressive writing treatments. We included 44 RCTs with 7724 participants contributing 54 direct comparisons between expressive writing (EW), enhanced writing (i.e. including additional therapist contact or individualized writing assignments; EW+), PTSD psychotherapies (PT), neutral writing (NW), and waiting-list control (WL). EW, EW+, PT, and NW were statistically significantly more efficacious than WL at the longest available follow-up, with SMDs (95% CI) of -0.78 (-1.10 to -0.46) for PT, -0.81 (-1.02 to -0.61) for EW+ , -0.43 (-0.65 to -0.21) for EW, and -0.37 (-0.61 to -0.14) for NW. We found small to moderate differences between the active treatments. At baseline mean PTSD severity was significantly lower in EW+ compared with WL. We found considerable heterogeneity and inconsistency and we found elevated risk of bias in at least one of the bias dimensions in all studies. When EW+-WL comparisons were excluded from the analyses EW+ was no longer superior compared with EW. The summarized evidence confirms that writing treatments may contribute to improving PTSD symptoms in medium to long-term. Methodological issues in the available evidence hamper definite conclusions regarding the comparative efficacy and acceptability of writing treatments. Adequately sized comparative randomized controlled trials preferably including all four active treatment approaches, reporting long-term data, and including researchers with balanced preferences are needed.

Exploring ways to mitigate the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic is important for long-term health. Expressive and gratitude-focused writing are effective methods to help individuals process traumatic or stressful events. Gratitude-focused writing may yield additional benefits because it helps individuals appraise events positively. We hypothesized that an online gratitude writing intervention would yield greater benefits than an expressive writing intervention or control group. Participants were randomized to one of three groups and completed assessments one-week and one-month post-intervention. The gratitude writing group maintained gratitude levels and decreased stress and negative affect at one-month post-intervention. The expressive writing group decreased in gratitude and showed no changes in stress or negative affect at one-month post-intervention. The control group decreased in gratitude and negative affect and showed no changes in stress at one-month post-intervention. Gratitude writing may be a better resource for dealing with stress and negative affect than traditional expressive writing methods under extremely stressful situations with uncertain trajectories.

This experimental study explored the use of online expressive writing interventions to cope with distress from heterosexist events among a sample of autistic-LBGQ + individuals. This study included an open writing condition and an emotion focused therapy guided writing condition. Over 89% of the participants indicated that the writing exercises were helpful in processing the event, with significant decreases for measures of depressive and trauma/stressor symptoms. A thematic analysis identified specific aspects of each condition that were helpful for participants in coping with heterosexist distress, such as the development of insight through the emotion-focused exercises. This low-demand exercise is promising as a solo exercise or as a therapy homework assignment, especially given the accessibility of this online intervention for autistic-LGBQ + people.

Expressive writing requires journaling stressor-related thoughts and feelings over four daily sessions of 15 min. Thirty years of research have popularized expressive writing as a brief intervention for fostering trauma-related resilience; however, its ability to surpass placebo remains unclear. This study aimed to determine the efficacy of expressive writing for improving post-traumatic stress symptoms in perinatal women who were living in the Houston area during major flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. A total of 1090 women were randomly allocated (1:1:1) to expressive writing, neutral writing or no writing. Interventions were internet-based. Online questionnaires were completed before randomization and at 2 months post-intervention. The primary outcome was post-traumatic stress symptoms, measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised; secondary outcomes were affective symptoms, measured with the 40-item Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Scales. Feelings throughout the intervention were reported daily using tailored questionnaires. In intention-to-treat analyses, no post-treatment between-group differences were found on the primary and secondary outcomes. Per-protocol analyses yielded similar results. A number of putative moderators were tested, but none interacted with expressive writing. Expressive writing produced greater feelings of anxiety and sadness during the intervention compared to neutral writing; further, overall experiences from the intervention mediated associations between expressive writing and greater post-traumatic stress at 2 months post-intervention. Among disaster-stricken perinatal women, expressive writing was ineffective in reducing levels of post-traumatic stress, and may have exacerbated these symptoms in some.

To explore whether emotional expressivity and the patterns of language use could predict benefits from expressive writing (EW) of breast cancer (BC) patients in a culture that strongly discourages emotional disclosure. Data were obtained from a recent trial in which we compared the health outcomes between a prolonged EW group (12 sessions) and a standard EW group (four sessions) ( = 56 per group) of BC patients receiving chemotherapy. The Chinese texts were tokenized using the THU Lexical Analyser for Chinese. Then, LIWC2015 was used to quantify positive and negative affect word use. Our first hypothesis that BC patients with higher levels of emotional expressivity tended to use higher levels of positive and negative affect words in texts was not supported ( = 0.067, = 0.549 and = 0.065, = 0.559, respectively). The level of emotional expressivity has a significant effect on the quality of life (QOL), and those who used more positive or fewer negative affective words in texts had a better QOL (all < 0.05). However, no significant difference was identified in physical and psychological well-being (all 0.05). Furthermore, the patterns of affective word use during EW did not mediate the effects of emotional expressivity on health outcomes (all > 0.05). Our findings suggest that the level of emotional expressivity and the pattern of affective word use could be factors that may moderate the effects of EW on QOL, which may help clinicians identify the individuals most likely to benefit from such writing exercises in China.

Objectives This review aimed to synthesize the available evidence on the effectiveness of expressive writing (EW) on health outcomes of patients with cancer. Methods A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Six databases were searched from 1986 to 9 July 2022. The searches were updated on 3 October 2023. Methodological quality was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and ROBINS-I tool for non-RCTs Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Narrative synthesis of outcomes was performed where meta-analysis was not appropriate. Results Thirty-four studies with 4316 participants were identified, including 31 RCTs and three non-RCTs. Twenty-one studies focused on women with breast cancer; the remainder recruited people with various cancer types. There was a significant improvement in fatigue (SMD =  − 0.3, 95% CI − 0.55 to − 0.66, P  = .002), passive mood (MD =  − 3.26, 95% CI =  − 5.83 to − 0.69, P  = 0.001), and the physical dimension of quality of life (MD = 3.21, 95% CI 0.18 to 6.25, P  = 0.04) but not for anxiety, depression, and global quality of life among patients who participated in EW when compared with control groups. Conclusion Findings showed some benefits of EW for people with cancer, but not necessarily in anxiety or depression. Heterogeneity in the delivery of interventions and their content, and shortcomings in the methodologies used highlight the need for stronger evidence in the field through high-quality trials and consistencies in the protocol, focusing on outcomes that this review highlighted as potential outcome targets.