Title: Effects of Writing About Stressful Experiences on Symptom Reduction in Patients With Asthma or Rheumatoid Arthritis
Abstract: 5][6] A brief written emotional expression exercise developed by Pennebaker and Beall 7 has been tested in studies of health benefits in healthy persons.It calls for participating subjects to write an essay, typically during a 3-day period, expressing their thoughts and feelings about a traumatic experience.Differences have been found between control subjects (who write about innocuous topics) and experimental subjects in frequency of subsequent health center visits, subjective well-being, and immune function. 8-10A recent metaanalysis of this written emotional expression exercise concluded that the procedure reliably improved health outcomes. 11rior studies have not addressed the clinical relevance of these findings, in part because their samples were physically healthy people.It is not clear that the effects extend to individuals with medical conditions.