TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of story-making in disclosure writing
T2 - The psychometrics of narrative
AU - Graybeal, Anna
AU - Sexton, Janel D.
AU - Pennebaker, James W.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Anthony Cordaro, Annemarie Johnson, Leah Moore, Seema Vijayan and Hayley Warner for assistance with data collection and entry. The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health (MH52391).
PY - 2002/10
Y1 - 2002/10
N2 - Writing about self-relevant emotional topics has a wide range of mental and physical health benefits. An appealing explanation for this phenomenon is that writing facilitates 'story-making' - the ability to make coherent and meaningful stories out of events in one's life - and it is forming a good story that promotes the health benefits. Despite the recent attention to this idea, the psychometrics and correlates of story-making are not known. The purpose of the current study was to explore this idea by measuring participants' story-making ability when writing about both emotional and unemotional topics and relate this to health, personality variables, and linguistic dimensions. Story-making was reliably assessed by independent raters, except for nonemotional topics. The ability to make good stories was not, however, consistent across topic, and story-making did not correlate with personality dimensions nor did it predict the health outcomes of participants.
AB - Writing about self-relevant emotional topics has a wide range of mental and physical health benefits. An appealing explanation for this phenomenon is that writing facilitates 'story-making' - the ability to make coherent and meaningful stories out of events in one's life - and it is forming a good story that promotes the health benefits. Despite the recent attention to this idea, the psychometrics and correlates of story-making are not known. The purpose of the current study was to explore this idea by measuring participants' story-making ability when writing about both emotional and unemotional topics and relate this to health, personality variables, and linguistic dimensions. Story-making was reliably assessed by independent raters, except for nonemotional topics. The ability to make good stories was not, however, consistent across topic, and story-making did not correlate with personality dimensions nor did it predict the health outcomes of participants.
KW - Psychometrics
KW - Story-making
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U2 - 10.1080/08870440290025786
DO - 10.1080/08870440290025786
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0036797901
SN - 0887-0446
VL - 17
SP - 571
EP - 581
JO - Psychology and Health
JF - Psychology and Health
IS - 5
ER -