Allison Clark (1999)

Popular wisdom has long recommended talking or writing about stressful situations. Previous research added significantly to this common belief, indicating that both talking and writing about stressful situations results in improved physical and emotional health, and a decreased likelihood of illness (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Colder & Sharp, 1990). Confiding about stress does lead to a short term increase in physiological arousal, but this is most likely due to the fact that it is generally difficult for people to talk about many stressful events (Pennebaker, Hughes & O'Heeron, 1987). Moreover, the long term benefits for health outweigh the initial discomfort from confiding, and these benefits occur independently of the point in the coping process--whether a stressful event occurred many years in the past or just recently, talking or writing about it helps (Pennebaker, Colder & Sharp, 1990).

Based on this research, I hypothesized that participants who wrote about stressful events in their lives would experience lower stress by the second session (two weeks after they started writing) than the control condition, who would not write. Because the study was conducted through the occurrence of Thanksgiving Break, I formed a secondary hypothesis that those participants who had their second session after the break would experience increased stress overall as a result of coming deadlines with the ending semester.

All 20 SBC psychology students filled out the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist, which is a basic likert scale questionnaire for measuring stress level. Ten participants were then randomly assigned to the experimental condition, and ten to the control. The two sessions of the experiment were planned around a regularly scheduled exam in whichever psychology class the participant had been recruited from. The first session was conducted two weeks before the exam. After filling out the questionnaire, the experimental participants were given daily diary forms and asked to write a little bit about stressful situations in their lives each night for two weeks. It was made clear to them that these diaries would never be collected, to insure privacy so that they would feel comfortable writing about any issue that caused them stress. Directly after the exam in their psychology classes (within one or two days), all participants returned and again filled out the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist. Participants in the experimental condition were asked to show their diary forms to assure that they had been done, but the diaries were not read. Participants were then fully debriefed.

A 2x2 repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze the data, and over all no significance was found, although there was a clear trend. Separate analyses were conducted for the groups completed before and after break, and significance was found for the group completed after break (p=.03). This finding suggests that, as stress increases with the end of the semester, the benefits of confiding also increase. It is also possible that stress was also reduced by going home for a break and relaxing with family members and friends, or more confiding was engaged in as a result of being in those surroundings. It is also important to note that many of the participants completed before the break came from introductory and statistics classes, whereas most completed after the break came from the class on personality, a somewhat higher level course. The second group, then, may have had more experience with psychology in general and recognized what was being studied and provided responses accordingly. Further research is necessary to examine the nature of the effects of having a break and changing stress levels in the semester, though it remains clear that confiding does indeed reduce stress.