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Chronic worriers, take note: Simply writing about your feelings may help you perform an upcoming stressful task more efficiently, finds a study that measured participants’ brain activity. The research provides the first neural evidence for the benefits of expressive writing, according to the lead scientist.
For the study, college students identified as chronically anxious through a validated screening measure completed a computer-based “flanker task” that measured their response accuracy and reaction times. Before the task, about half of the participants wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings about the upcoming task for eight minutes; the other half, in the control condition, wrote about what they did the day before. While the two groups performed at about the same level for speed and accuracy, the expressive-writing group performed the flanker task more efficiently, meaning they used fewer brain resources, measured with electroencephalography, or EEG, in the process.Image credit: G.L. Kohuth
