The benefits of psychological displacement in diary writing when using different pronouns

Abstract

This study examined a new emotional writing paradigm, that is PDDP. PDDP instructs participants to write diary in first-person pronoun first, and then narrate the same event from a different perspective using second-person pronoun. Finally, the participants write it again with third-person pronoun from yet another perspective. These three narrations were to be written in a consecutive sequential order. Results demonstrated that diary writers indeed benefited from features of PDDP. It also showed that highly anxious people received most long-term therapeutic effect from PDDP. We argue that PDDP enacts the needed mechanism to balance psychological distance prolonging and self-disclosure making in emotional writing.