Khi bạn đang nói chuyện với ai đó đang có tâm trạng phiền muộn, bạn cũng có thể tự nhiên hiểu được tác dụng tốt của việc giúp cho người ấy giải tỏa cảm xúc. Với một người đang trong trạng thái hoảng sợ, quẫn trí, bạn cũng có thể mang đến cho người ấy sự hỗ trợ về mặt cảm xúc bằng những lời khuyên và một thái độ vững chãi để người ấy có thể tin tưởng nương tựa vào bạn | 578 PART VIII. SPECIFIC COPING APPROACHES ics such as the description of the room in which they were seated. Whereas writing about traumas produced increased health benefits as compared with controls in a variety of more recent studies researchers have shown that simply writing about one s thoughts and feelings about coming to college or about the experience of getting laid off in the case of the unemployed engineers produced comparable salubrious health outcomes. Similarly when students were asked to write about imaginary traumas as though they had lived through them they evidenced similar health benefits as compared with individuals who wrote about their own trauma Greenberg Stone Wortman 1996 . The venting of emotions per se appears insufficient in the absence of cognitive processing. Although such venting may bring about subjective improvements and self-reports of improved mental health health gains appear to require the translating of one s experiences into language. This was demonstrated in a study in which participants were asked either to express a traumatic experience using bodily movement to express an experience using movement and then write about it or to exercise in a prescribed manner for 3 days 10 minutes per day. Only the movement plus writing group evinced significant improvements in physical health and grade point average Krantz Pennebaker 1997 . It is clear from all the studies that exploring emotions and thoughts regardless of the content is critical for the elicitation of health benefits. Based on his meta-analysis Smyth 1998 concludes that emotional disclosure is a necessary but not sufficient factor to beget the benefits from writing about trauma. Recent research findings support a two-step multidimensional approach to explain the effects of disclosure. First confiding traumas a reduces the physiological arousal associated with inhibition and b increases one s ability to understand and integrate the experience Salovey Rothman Rodin 1998 . .
