Expressive writing and the role of alexythimia as a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure and psychological health

Psychology students were randomly assigned to a condition in which they had to write for 20 min on 3 days or for 3 min on 1 day a factual description of disclosed traumas, undisclosed traumas, or recent social events. In the case of undisclosed traumatic events, intensive writing about these events showed a beneficial effect on affect and on the affective impact of remembe ring the event and appraisal. Participants who wrote briefly about an undis closed traumatic event showed a more negative appraisal. Participants who w rote intensively about a traumatic event and had a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure, measured by a Toronto Alexithymia Scale subscale, showed a positive effect on self-reported measures of affect. Difficulty in descri bing feelings, an alexythimia dimension, correlated with psychological heal th problems, emotional inhibition, and a less introspective content of writ ten essays about the emotional events.