Psychology Commons^™

Writing At The Horizon: How Producing Imagined Narratives Affects Mood, David Yu-Zhong Liang

Senior Projects Fall 2021

The present study explores the effect of three different writing activities and their subsequent effects on participant mood. Writing has been of particular interest for psychologists due to its use in interventions aimed at working through traumatic or stressful periods, and recent research has begun to explore the use of narrative in placing traumatic events and experiences in greater context. However, purely therapeutic, intervention-based writing exercises exclude a large amount of more expressive, imagined creations and narratives, which may have the capacity to reorient, contextualize, and otherwise positively affect a person’s mood. This study investigates whether employing the imagination may …