The study aimed to determine the effect of expressive writing on the psychological and physical conditions of the college students. Expressive writing refers to writing in which an individual describes deep thoughts and feelings surrounding relevant event, topic, or area. As the world suffers from the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions shifted from face-to-face activities to mostly online learning modalities. Students were affected especially from lower socioeconomic localities due to their limited financial capacity to obtain the necessary gadgets and internet connectivity. Also, they felt social isolation, lack of interaction with fellow students and the uncertainty of when the pandemic will be over. The study used experimental design with pre-test and post-test and randomly assigned the respondents into control group writing about their daily activities and the experimental group using expressive writing with each group has 60 respondents. The results showed that the respondents who wrote about their daily activities have no significant difference in their pre-test and post-test while there is a significant difference in the experimental group. Moreover, there is no significant difference in the pre-test of both groups whereas, there is a significant difference in the post-test of both groups in terms of anxiety, depression and physical symptoms. In conclusion, using expressive writing can overcome traumas and emotional upheavals thus resolves issues and improves the health conditions.
Expressive writing, Anxiety symptoms, Depressive symptoms, Physical symptoms, COVID-19 pandemic
This paper is presented in 3rd International Conference on Multidisciplinary Industry and Academic Research (ICMIAR)
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