2016 Volume 10 Issue 1 Pages 47-57
Expressive writing is one of the alternative ways to manage stress. It consists in writing about one’s stressful event. Although expressive writing is expected to spread due to the low cost, no intervention studies have been conducted in older adults in Japan. The present study examined the effectiveness of expressive writing for healthy older Japanese as pilot study.
Participants were 129 community-dwelling older adults from an urban city Tokyo in Japan. In this paradigm of intervention group, participants were given a homework, which consisted in writing at home for 15 minutes each day for a total duration of 3 days. Participants in a control group were distributed to similar homework, but they wrote about the prices of their having bought commodities the day before.
We statistically analyzed 32 participants who accomplished homework [Intervention group: n=13; control group: n=19]. We measured the Negative Rumination Trait（NRT）as main outcome. The results showed that participants who had higher NRT scores at pre-test had lower NRT scores in expressive writing than their counterparts. This study implies that expressive writing is effective for improving rumination in healthy older Japanese who have a high negative rumination trait.
