PSYC 314 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: James W. Pennebaker, Random Assignment, Coping With
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Rumination - leads to more bad stress outcomes, illness, unhealthiness. Traumatic event emotional reaction inhibition impaired immune system functioning. Freud: by repressing your emotion from event, you are using up tons of energy (psychic. Energy), which would normally be used in your immune function. So this inhibition had negative physiological effects, as well as the psychological effects. For an artist, like van gogh self portrait after cutting off ear. For most of us, engage in emotional expression through talking to other people. Another way expressive writing: writiing your feelings down. Questionnaire studies: gave questionnaires asking them about past traumatic experiences, and whether they talked about them. He found that people who had reported traumatic happenings in childhood, or earlier in life, and had not talked about their trauma, had more physician visits. But of course, there are other plausible interpretations here, since it is correlational data, and not a random assignment .