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The benefits of psychological displacement in diary writing when using different pronouns
Author(s) -
Seih Y. T.,
Lin Y. C.,
Huang C. L.,
Peng C. W.,
Huang S. P.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
british journal of health psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.05
H-Index - 88
eISSN - 2044-8287
pISSN - 1359-107X
DOI - 10.1348/135910707x250875
Subject(s) - pronoun , perspective (graphical) , psychology , personal pronoun , first person , third person , reflexive pronoun , linguistics , social psychology , cognitive psychology , psychoanalysis , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence
This study examined a new emotional writing paradigm, that is PDDP. PDDP instructs participants to write diary in first‐person pronoun first, and then narrate the same event from a different perspective using second‐person pronoun. Finally, the participants write it again with third‐person pronoun from yet another perspective. These three narrations were to be written in a consecutive sequential order. Results demonstrated that diary writers indeed benefited from features of PDDP. It also showed that highly anxious people received most long‐term therapeutic effect from PDDP. We argue that PDDP enacts the needed mechanism to balance psychological distance prolonging and self‐disclosure making in emotional writing.