So what you can see here is that when working memory demands are low (easy problems), people respond pretty fast and don’t make a lot of errors, regardless of anxiety. But when they need to use more of their working memory on the hard problems (High WM demand), anxiety starts to get in the way. That’s why you see such a big difference between the individuals with high math anxiety (HMA) and low math anxiety (LMA) in the control condition on the hard problems. In the expressive writing condition (called “EW” here, but it’s really not gross at all!), those with low math anxiety perform pretty much the same as in the control, but the individuals with high anxiety perform much better, and, statistically speaking, they look the same as those with low anxiety!
Why Does Expressive Writing Work?
Why does this work? Well, we don’t know exactly. There are a few possibilities (and all of these may actually play a role here).
1) Expressive writing may allow individuals to better organize and understand their emotions, leading to more effective coping mechanisms.
2) Expressive writing may free up working memory by allowing the individual to psychologically distance themselves from the source of stress.
3) Expressive writing may serve as a type of distributed cognition, allowing the individual to stop monitoring, knowing that they can pick that stress back up later (sort of like writing your grocery list on a piece of paper so you don’t have to keep it in mind… until you lose the paper).
A Word of Caution
It should be noted that this is only one study on a specific population (college students) in one domain (math). If these variables changed, it might affect how much expressive writing is needed in order to get these same effects. Still, given that this is a relatively easy intervention that takes little prep and little time, it might be worth trying to see if students who are struggling with various types of performance-related anxiety might benefit. If you do try this technique, let us know how it works for you or your students!
