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FYI Studying Emotions and Health
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James Pennebaker is a research psychologist who is interested in the connection between emotions and health (Pennebaker and Graybeal, 2001). You may be interested to learn how his research proceeded through the four steps of the scientific method:

1. Conceptualize a problem. Early in his career, Pennebaker experienced about a month of deep depression and emotional isolation due to problems in his marriage. He began to write privately every day about his problems. After about a week of writing, he noticed his depression lifting (Pennebaker, 1997). Some years later, he wondered why his private writing had helped him. Could people with emotional troubles achieve the same relief he had simply by writing about their problems? Could they actually improve their physical health?

To explore these ideas further, Pennebaker began by developing a hypothesis that he could test through objective observations. For example, exactly what did he mean by "writing about emotions"? What did he mean by "physical health"? In 1983 Pennebaker and a graduate student, Sandra Beall, decided to test the following hypothesis:

If people write about their negative emotions and the situations that caused them, people will reduce their stress and be more healthy in the future.

 As an operational definition of (a way to measure) writing about emotions, they decided they would instruct their student volunteer participants to write continuously for 15 minutes each day on four consecutive days about an upsetting or traumatic experience and to express how they felt about the experience when it happened and how they felt about it while writing. As an operational definition of health, they decided to record the number of illness visits that their participants made to the student health center before, during, and after the study.

2. Collect research information (data). Among the important decisions to be made about collecting data are who the participants are going to be. Psychologists usually want to be able to draw conclusions from their study that will apply to a larger group of people (a population) than the participants they actually study (a sample of the population).

Generalization from the sample to the population can be made only if the sample is representative-or "typical"-of the population. A random sample, in which every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected, provides much better grounds for generalizing the results to a population than a nonrandom sample does.

Random samples are not always necessary, however, especially if the researcher wants to study specific aspects of behavior under specific conditions. Pennebaker's sample wasn't random but rather a group of 46 students at the university where he taught who had volunteered to be his subjects.

Because a sample of students at a particular university is not likely to be very representative of people in general, Pennebaker needed to be cautious about generalizing from the sample. He would want to try similar experiments on other samples (for example, older people, nonstudents, people in other countries) before he generalized about most humans.

3. Analyze data. Pennebaker used a number of statistical procedures to determine whether students' health benefited from writing about emotional experiences. As shown below, the students who wrote about their emotional experiences and those who wrote about other things (the control group) visited the health center about equally prior to the experiment. However, after the writing group wrote about their emotional experiences, they visited the health center considerably less than the control group. Psychologists often use graphs like this one to highlight the overall trends and relationships in their results.

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4. Draw conclusions. When Pennebaker and Beall examined their results, they found that the participants who wrote about their feelings made significantly fewer illness visits to the student health center afterward than those who did not write about their emotions. Thus the results confirmed the hypothesis and suggested that emotional writing actually improves a person's physical health.

Keep in mind that the reliability of these findings could not be established until other experiments were performed to test the same basic idea under different conditions and with different samples of participants. Some similar studies have shown that writing about emotions does not necessarily have the same results for everyone.

However, one later study redefined health operationally in terms of participants' blood profiles (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser, 1988). It found that the emotional writing led to improvements in the immune system.

Another study involved a group of unemployed middle-aged engineers who were deeply angry after having been suddenly fired by a corporation for which some of them had worked for 30 years (Spera, Buhrfeind, and Pennebaker, 1994). This study found that emotional writing led many of the engineers to overcome their frustration and find new jobs but that engineers who did not do the writing remained angry and unemployed.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions (Rev. ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

Pennebaker, J. W., and Graybeal, A. (2001). Patterns of natural language use: Disclosure, personality, and social integration. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32, 90-93.

Pennebaker, J. W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J. D., and Glaser, G. (1988). Disclosure of traumas and immune function: Health implications for psychotherapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56, 239-245.

Spera, S. P., Buhrfeind, E. D., and Pennebaker, J. W. (1994). Expressive writing and coping with job loss. Academy of Management Journal, 37, 722-733.

1

Because every student at a college has an identification number, a computer program can be used to select groups of students in such a way that every student has an equal opportunity to be selected for any experiment conducted by the psychology department. Groups selected in this manner are _______________.
A)biased samples
B)random samples
C)experimental groups
D)control groups
2

The entire group about which an investigator wants to learn is a .
3

The subset of a larger group that an experimenter has chosen for an experiment is a .
4

The assignment of participants to the experimental or control group by chance is assignment.
5

A subset of a population in which every member has an equal opportunity to be chosen is a .





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