Effets de l’expression écrite d’un événement positif et négatif sur le niveau d’anxiété d’étudiants de différentes disciplines

Abstract

This study concerns the field of writing and its influence on the emotional state of writers ( Pennebaker, 2002). In this field of research, participants are usually requested to express their feelings and emotions following the occurrence of negative events. It is thus important to collect data concerning the influence of positive experiences. By contrast, our study aimed at exploring the impact of expressive writing in two opposite contexts. One context concerns a negative experience (exam's failure) and the other context refers to a positive experience (exam's success). Expressive writing is usually studied in relation to mental (mostly depression) and physical health of the participants. The impact of expressive writing affect on the writers’ anxiety has more rarely been investigated. This is the reason why we have examined the effect of writing on the levels of anxiety of writers. Writing expertise has also been shown to depend on academic disciplines. To fulfill these different goals, undergraduate students ( n = 119) belonging to three different university discipliones (arts, sciences and psychology students) responded to the S-Anxiety scale and when then required to write about their feeling concerning the positive or negative topics. The level of anxiety was again measured afterwards. The main question under investigation is to know if emotion regulation (in the sense of Lepore et al., 2002) would vary as a function of the nature of the described event. We hypothesize that variations in anxiety would depend on these events and that impact of emotional regulation would also differ according to the students’ curses. The results show that sciences students are not as verbose (measures in terms of verbal volume) than arts and psychology students. Moreover, emotional content of writing has been analyzed with Emotaix-Tropes ( Piolat and Bannour, 2009a). Whatever the course, students produced both positive and negative lexicon for the two topics. However, positive lexicon was proportionally more important in the Success and an inverse result was observed in the Failure situation. The anxiety level was higher following the use of negative valence lexicon and was lower following the use of lexicon of positive valence. The short term beneficial effect of disclosure is thus not observed in case of a negative event. In addition, students with a scientific curse showed more variations in their emotional state.