The psychodynamic diagnosis helps to understand the meaning of the disease and its treatment, and to design a supportive-expressive intervention modulated on psychological and medical status.
The remaining studies had used a variety of interventions, including stress management, hypnosis, art therapy, expressive writing intervention, crisis intervention and various types of counselling.
This meta-analysis evaluated the effects of the expressive writing intervention (EW; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986) among adolescents.
The Tree of Life group programme is a narrative-based expressive arts intervention, designed to target the psychological difficulties faced by young people from refugee backgrounds.
Further hypotheses/outcomes concern post-traumatic growth and are: 1) the modified disease-related expressive writing intervention is effective in enhancing post-traumatic growth relative to sham and control conditions; 2) the modified disease-related expressive writing intervention is more effective in enhancing post-traumatic growth than the standard expressive writing task.
Multiple psychological variables relevant to patients with CVD will be assessed in order to examine the specific effects of the expressive writing intervention on some psychosocial risk factors related to CV morbidity in this population.
The most evaluated form of therapeutic writing is the expressive writing intervention as described by Pennebaker et al. 3 7–9 Expressive writing is a technique whereby people are encouraged to write (or talk into a tape recorder) in private about a traumatic, stressful or upsetting event, usually from their recent or distant past.
A second goal of the study is to determine whether the effects of the expressive writing intervention vary as a function of four potential moderating variables: coping styles, negative affectivity and social constraint (type D personality factors), perceived social support and evaluative ratings of the writing intervention.
Most previous research examining the efficacy of brief expressive writing interventions have used small sample sizes and followed people for no more than 3 months.
Another analysis of covariance was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the language intervention on expressive vocabulary for the sample.
In addition, despite impressive improvement due to our intervention, the expressive language abilities of the intervention group remained significantly lower compared to the language-normal group.
