记日记强化心理创伤?

记日记强化心理创伤?

写日记一直被认为是情绪宣泄的一个很好的方式。但英国心理学家的研究表明，记日记并未纾解不幸，而是强化了心理创伤，对人的健康更有损害

英国心理学家近日完成的一项有趣的研究发现，经常写日记竟然对人体健康有害。他们发现，经常写日记的人比不写日记的人更容易受到头痛、失眠、消化系统疾病和社交障碍的困扰。

这一发现对人们的常识提出了挑战，人们一般认为，把经历过的写下来，有助于宣泄不 良情绪以及抚平创伤。“我们曾期望坚持写日记的人比不写日记的人表现得更好，或至少持平，但他们变得更糟了。”研究者之一，英国格拉斯哥喀里多尼安大学的 伊莱恩·邓肯说，“事实上，如果你什么都不写可能要好得多。”

这项研究由伊莱恩·邓肯和斯塔福德郡大学的戴维·谢菲尔德主持，他们的研究结果在上周三爱丁堡召开的英国心理学协会会议上进行了公布。

这项试验有94名经常写日记的人和41名不写日记的人参加，他们全都是英国斯塔福德郡大学的学生。这些学生被详细询问了记日记的习惯，并且要求填写一份标准的健康问卷。

邓肯说：“我们的想法是想检验‘写日记是一种良好的宣泄方式’这一观念的正确性。受试者自由地写下他们的想法，这是第一次以这种方式进行研究。”

研究人员要求写日记的志愿者说明他们多长时间记一次日记以及保持这个习惯有多长时 间了。他们也被问及是否曾经记述过创伤经历。结果经常写日记的人健康方面的评分比不写日记的人更糟，而且从统计学上来说这一点表现得很显著。受影响最严重 的恰恰是那些曾经记录过创伤经历的写日记的人。“他们对头痛或者其他类似症状是最敏感的”，邓肯说。

尽管没什么证据，邓肯认为用写日记作为宣泄情绪的方式似乎并不合理。写日记的 人要经常咀嚼他们的不幸，而不是将情绪一次性宣泄并从创伤中解脱出来。写日记的人总是忘不掉那些不幸的事。但是邓肯也承认试验并没有显示出是写日记在前， 还是发生健康问题在前，也就是说可能有相关性，但因果关系并不明了。在即将进行的实验中，邓肯会让志愿者在日记中记下明确的正面和负面不好的经历，看看健 康问题究竟是在什么时候出现。

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这是我搜出来的这篇文章的英文原文

Dear diary, you make me sick
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6374-dear-diary-you-make-me-sick.html

Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

The study, carried out with David Sheffield of Staffordshire University, was presented on Wednesday at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh.

Cathartic process

The pair studied 94 regular diarists and compared their health with that of 41 non-diarists. The subjects, all students at Staffordshire University, answered questions about their diary-keeping habits, and filled in a standard health questionnaire.

“We decided to test the idea that writing is cathartic,” says Duncan. She claims that her study is the first to investigate subjects who write of their own free will. In most other studies, volunteers are actually asked to write about traumatic experiences in a systematic way.

The researchers asked the diarists recruited to say how often they made entries and for how long they had kept diaries. They were also asked if they had written about anything traumatic.

Statistically, the diarists scored much worse on health measures than the non-diarists. And worst affected of all were those who had written about trauma. “They were most susceptible to headaches and the like,” says Duncan.

Ruminative cycle

Although she does not have proof, Duncan speculates that diarists buck the usual trend because instead of a single, cathartic outpouring to offload trauma, diarists continually churn over their misfortunes and so never get over them. “It’s probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle,” she says.

But she acknowledges that her experiment could not demonstrate which came first - the diary writing or the health problems.

In a forthcoming experiment, she hopes to explore this by asking volunteers new to diary writing to report exclusively positive or negative things, to see if the health of the two groups diverges.

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这篇文章中的观点让我觉得不可思议。

我觉得日记的确会让人不停地回忆，既是回忆伤痛，也是回忆喜悦。你以前的生活中出现过什么，日记中就能回忆什么。

不过，写日记的确是练文笔的一个好机会。我以前在学校时上课很枯燥，我就写日记。写了也不知道多长时间，感觉自己的写作水平确实有一定的提高，写出来的明明是有感而发的散乱句子，但是看起来风格就像报纸杂志上看到的一样，那时候还是有点成就感的。

所以，我觉得写日记还是有点用的，最起码是在那些学者研究出个所以然来之前（反正他们的研究也不是很确切）。