Expressive writing can increase working memory

Much of the work on the benefits of expressive writing has focused on how writing about very negative experiences, such as trauma, provides emotional benefits Pennebaker et al. However, there is also evidence that writing about more universally experienced negative events and emotions, such as test anxiety and failure, confers benefits as well Klein and Boals, ; Ramirez and Beilock, ; DiMenichi and Richmond, ; DiMenichi et al.

Our neural results show that expressive writing about commonplace negative events, such as failure, leads to differences in neural processes during cognitive tasks similar to those encountered in school environments, such as memory tasks. This suggests that expressive writing has downstream effects not only for those who have endured very negative experiences, such as trauma but for almost anyone.

This has implications for educational environments, as it shows how experiences that may seem unrelated to the task at hand, such as experiencing and writing about failure, can then influence neural processing during learning.

Furthermore, since failure can be experienced within academic environments e. Indeed, previous work showing that writing about test anxiety helps decrease that anxiety and boosts performance suggests that expressive writing may be an effective tool for educators to use to address negative emotions stemming from classroom experiences.

Nevertheless, our fMRI results suggest that writing about particularly stressful failures may have led to MCC activity more like control participants, which is in line with previous findings that the benefits of expressive writing may be strongest when writing about strongly negative events Harber and Pennebaker, ; Pennebaker, This may be one possible reason why, contrary to the results of our pilot behavioral study, we did not see significant performance differences across writing groups on our task.

It is possible that behavioral differences between groups would be stronger if the writing topic was more strongly negative, such as a trauma. It is interesting to note that previous research has suggested that the beneficial outcomes of expressive writing may be related to positive aspects of writing, such as meaning making and affect labeling Pennebaker and Chung, ; Memarian et al.

Although we did not observe behavioral differences between groups in our sample, differences in neural activation between groups in the absence of behavioral differences can still reveal important differences in cognition underlying behavior Gilman et al. Behavioral results were also highly correlated with age in our sample, perhaps suggesting that younger participants had greater difficulty focusing on our learning task.

Furthermore, although we did not find a significant relationship between age and self-reported event stress ratings, perhaps younger participants were less likely to have experienced the type of failures that result in learning benefits after writing about them, especially considering that persistence improves as one ages, likely as a result of experience Duckworth et al.

Future studies might consider implementing our task on a sample with a slightly older mean age. We conducted a PPI analysis that found that, among participants who wrote about past failures, the MCC may participate in a network of activation in conjunction with the caudate and mPFC.

This activation may underlie differences in affective experience of the task. However, individual differences in activation in these regions did not predict any measures of behavior. Future directions may include measuring affect throughout the task in order to better parse the relationship between MCC and subsequent neural activation.

A potential limitation of our experimental design is that the content of the writing in our control condition was free to vary along many dimensions, including valence, based on the movie each participant chose to write about. However, ratings of negativity of the writing samples within the control condition were not significantly correlated with MCC activation, suggesting that heterogeneity in the negativity of the writing content in this condition was not driving activation in this region.

Furthermore, the control condition was designed to be rich in episodic content, rather than completely neutral in valence, since writing about something fully neutral could have introduced a potential confound of boredom. That a min writing exercise resulted in group differences in subsequent neural activation during an unrelated learning task emphasizes the underappreciated role of state-based differences in neural activation to the task at hand, which may be related to recent experiences, such as recalling and writing about a failure.

Broadly speaking, our findings suggest that writing about a past failure, especially a failure that one found to be particularly stressful, may be related to altered neural processing in the MCC. In addition to adding to our understanding of the mechanisms by which expressive writing influences cognition, our results have implications for educators hoping to improve learning, especially after students experience academic failure.

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Rutgers Institutional Review Board with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Rutgers Institutional Review Board.

BD and ET designed the experiment. BD ran subjects through the task and performed statistical analyses. All authors contributed to advising on statistical analyses and writing the manuscript. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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