The simple act of writing about traumatic experiences (Written Emotional Disclosure, WED) has been shown to result in long-term improvements in health. Individuals with chronic pain, characterized by heightened pain sensitization, have also benefited from WED. Our laboratory recently showed that multiple sessions of WED produce a short-term increase in pain sensitization followed by a long-term decrease in women with trauma history. Although the mechanisms of multi-session WED are beginning to be understood, the acute effects remain understudied. Here we examined the acute effects of WED after a single session of writing on suprathreshold heat (Experiment 1) and on capsaicin-induced spontaneous pain (Experiment 2). Prior studies indicated that WED induces short-term increases in negative affect and arousal leading to our hypothesis of heightened pain following trauma writing. Contrary to our hypothesis, following one session of writing about their most traumatic experience, women reported reduced pain intensity ( F (1,80) = 4.958, p F (1,69) = 3.7, p F (1,26) = 4.517, p F (1,26) = 4.096, p
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