The Benefits of Expressive Writing on Long-Term Memory Performance

Previous research has shown that expressive writing can be beneficial to cognition by increasing working memory performance. The present study examined whether expressive writing about negative life events could facilitate long-term memory performance. Participants either wrote about a negative life event or completed a neutral, non-writing task involving math calculations. Participants then completed a fan effect task involving long-term memory, where they learned subject-location sentences (subjects were paired with multiple locations) and later attempted to recognize a particular subject-location as quickly and as accurately as possible. The results showed that following expressive writing, subject-location pairs were learned faster relative to the neutral task. There was also some evidence that participants who wrote expressively recognized subject-location pairings more quickly and more accurately than participants in the neutral condition. We conclude that expressive writing has the potential to facilitate cognition beyond immediate recall, which has important educational implications.