Coping with Traumatic Experiences: An Analysis of the Health Benefits of Combining Music Listening with the Expressive Writing Paradigm.

The primary concern of this study was to empirically examine the health benefits of integrating two creativity-based approaches to coping with traumatic experiences, music listening and Pennebaker and Beall's (1986) expressive writing paradigm, in which participants write about past traumatic experiences on consecutive days. The study also included an examination of whether the addition of music to the expressive writing paradigm would lead to any additional increase in negative mood immediately following participation in the intervention. Participants were 60 young adults (ages 18 to 25) living in the New York City area, recruited through Craigslist and recruitment flyers posted at local colleges and universities. Twenty participants were assigned to each of three intervention groups, one baseline writing condition and two conditions in which writing was supplemented with music listening. Participants in the two music listening conditions prepared 20-minute sets of either their favorite songs or songs they considered to be distress-ameliorating (depending on the group to which they had been assigned), and listened to these songs while participating in the expressive writing intervention. Participants completed questionnaires concerning health difficulties both prior to their participation in the study and two months postintervention, and completed questionnaires concerning immediate negative mood before and after each of the three intervention sessions. Contrary to expectations, the addition of music listening (with either favorite or distress-ameliorating songs) to the expressive writing paradigm was not shown to increase the salutary effects of the intervention. While it is possible that this is an accurate reflection of the value of adding music listening to the expressive writing paradigm, it is also possible that methodological limitations in the study (including the length of the pre- and postintervention time periods assessed and the number of participants recruited) prevented detection of significant differences between the intervention groups in reduction of health difficulties. As expected, the addition of music listening to the expressive writing paradigm did not lead to a greater increase in immediate negative mood in comparison to expressive writing without music. No differences were found between the two music listening groups in either health difficulties or immediate negative mood.