Immediate Effect of Expressive-Gratitude Writing: Emotion Craft through Writing During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The world is gradually recovering from the coronavirus outbreak, which was first declared in early 2020 and the pandemic is slowly shifting into an endemic. This transition has brought a profound effect on individuals’ mental states. Grief over the loss of loved ones and general suffering appear simultaneously with gratitude because of receiving social support and surviving among many other things. One of the effective and inexpensive interventions to deal with depression is expressive writing. To date, this intervention is still popular. There are two types of expressive writing, the first is writing down negative events, and the second is writing positive things or gratitude writing. These two writing techniques are generally not combined and alone rarely result in immediate effect (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005). The purpose of this research is to find out the immediate effect of expressing negative events as well as gratitude writing, combining the two writing techniques with the perspective of cathartic-insight theory and gratitude. In the course of this research, expressive-gratitude writing was carried out for three consecutive days. The participants wrote about negative events on the first day, the impact of negative events from the perspective of others on the second, and on the last day, they wrote a letter of gratitude and learning. Immediately after completing the tasks, the depression level of the research participants (N=50, M-age= 33.69; n-woman= 40, n-man= 10) was measured using the BDI-II (21 items) and the Gratitude Questionnaire (6 items). The statistical test using the paired t-test revealed a significant decrease in the BDI-II average score and a significant increase in the gratitude average score. In contrast to previous studies which found that the immediate effect of expressive writing was either enhancing distress or showing no effect whatsoever, this research suggested that the immediate effect of expressive-gratitude writing could significantly reduce negative emotions and increase gratitude.