Expressive writing can increase working memory capacity
Writing about a stressful experience freed up mental capacity. Students who wrote about their thoughts and feelings showed measurably larger working memory gains seven weeks later than students who wrote about a trivial topic - and the gains were largest for those whose writing used more cause and insight words.
A concrete mechanism for why journaling might help: it stops you carrying the thing around.
Most claims about journaling are about mood. This one is about cognition, and it is measurable.
In the first experiment, 35 freshmen wrote about their thoughts and feelings about starting college; 36 wrote about a trivial topic. Seven weeks later, the first group showed larger working memory gains.
In the second, students wrote about a negative personal experience, a positive experience, or a trivial topic. Those writing about the negative experience showed both greater working memory improvement and declines in intrusive thinking.
The authors’ model: unresolved stressful experiences occupy working memory through intrusive and avoidant thinking. Writing reduces that intrusion, which frees the capacity back up.
The most actionable detail in the paper. Increased use of cause and insight words - because, realise, understand - was associated with greater working memory improvement. Writing that explains appears to do more than writing that merely vents. That distinction runs through the whole literature, and it is the difference between reflection and rumination.
Note the honest limit: that word-use finding is a correlation inside the writing group, not something the researchers assigned.
These are two studies of college students in a single semester, with small groups, so the effect needs replication before being treated as established. The cause-and-insight word finding is correlational within the writing group, not an experimental manipulation, so it does not prove that deliberately using explanatory language would produce the gains.
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Summarized by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
