Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative

Writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as lit tle as 15 minutes over the course of three days brings about improvements i n mental and physical health. This finding has been replicated across age, gender, culture, social class, and personality type. Using a text-analysis computer program, it was discovered that those who benefit maximally from w riting tend to use a high number of positive-emotion words, a moderate amou nt of negative-emotion words, and increase their use of cognitive words ove r the days of writing. These findings suggest that the formation of a narra tive is critical and is an indicator of good mental and physical health. On going studies suggest that writing serves the function of organizing comple x emotional experiences. Implications for these findings for psychotherapy are briefly discussed. (C) 1999 John Wiley &( Sons, Inc.