Pouring
your emotions out on paper could help wounds heal quicker, researchers
say.
It is thought that writing about troubling experiences helps
people deal with them.
This could then help the immune system work more effectively,
researchers told the British Psychological Society conference
in Stoke-on-Trent.
They say their findings offer a cheap and easy to administer
way of helping patients heal faster.
In the study, which involved 36 people, half were asked to write
about the most upsetting experience they had had, spelling out
how they had felt.
The rest of the study participants wrote about trivial things,
such as how they spent their free time.
Both groups spent 20 minutes a day for three days writing.
Following the writing exercise, researchers created a small skin
puncture on the participants' upper arms.
The wounds were examined two weeks later.
It was found that the group who had written about their emotional
experiences had smaller wounds, meaning they had healed more quickly.
Those whose wounds were healing more slowly were found to have
higher levels of stress and psychological distress.
Suzanne Scott, from the Unit of Psychology at King's College
London, who led the research, said: "These findings have
implications for the development of relatively brief and easy
interventions that could have beneficial effects on wound healing.
"The theory is that there's a long-term health benefit.
She added: "It's easy to administer because the people don't
need to have gone through some awful experience, they just need
to write about their most upsetting experience."
Psychologists say stress also influences how people recover from
surgery.
Professor John Weinman of King's College London told the BPS
conference: "These research findings can help patients and
will be important for developing interventions for patients undergoing
different types of surgery."
(Agencies)