Honors Thesis Archive

AuthorLibby Bauman
TitleThe Effects of Narrative and Creative Writing on Mood and College Adjustment
DepartmentPsychology
AdvisorsStephanie Little, Nancy Woehrle, and Michael Mattison
Year2018
HonorsUniversity Honors
Full TextView Thesis (475 KB)
At the author's request, an electronic copy of this thesis is only available to on-campus users.
AbstractThe current study examined the effect of narrative and creative writing interventions that focused on students' deepest thoughts about coming to college. Participants wrote for ten minutes during two different sessions two to five days apart either about coming to college or their daily activities (control). Those who wrote about coming to college wrote either in narrative form or in the form of a haiku. Positive and negative affect as well as adjustment to college, both academic and social, were measured before the first writing intervention and three weeks after the final intervention. The text of participants' responses was analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, Boyd, & Francis, 2015). LIWC detected positive and negative emotion words, cognitive processing words, including causation ones, and use of firstperson within the writing. Writing condition did not have an effect on mood or adjustment. However, writing condition did have an effect on LIWC variables. Notably, the creative writing condition produced more negative emotion words than the narrative condition. Some evidence of the interaction of LIWC variables and condition when predicting changes in negative affect and social adjustment was shown.

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