Abstract
Expressive writing (EW) can be an effective way to alter maladaptive emotional reactions to stressful life events,although little is known about how pre-adolescents may benefit from it. In this quasi-experimental study, wecompared measures of depression, anger, forgiveness, positive and negative affect in pre-adolescents beforeand after EW in both an experimental group undergoing the EW paradigm and a control group (N=138). Nosignificant effects between control and experimental groups were found for the considered variables, exceptfor positive and negative affect. We suggest potential reasons accounting for these results. Given that thetheorised mechanisms involved in the EW paradigm include executive functioning abilities, it is possible thatpreadolescents may not be able to benefit from it, due to not fully developed executive functioning skills.Our results provide useful information in order to better design future studies and prevention/interventionprogrammes to be implemented with preadolescents.
