Chasing elusive expressive writing effects: emotion-acceptance instructions and writer engagement improve outcomes.

Introduction: Pennebaker's expressive writing (EW) paradigm in which participants are encouraged to explore their "deepest thoughts and feelings" about a difficult experience in several short writing sessions has yielded impressive mental health outcomes and holds great promise as a cost-effective intervention. Yet results have been difficult to replicate and it is unclear what conditions are necessary for observing the effect. Our aim was to discover reasons for the variability in EW outcomes.

Enhancing Student Learning by Integrating Anatomy in Pathology Teaching.

Background: Vertically integrating anatomy into pathology curricula is beneficial for student-centered learning. This study investigates the effectiveness of this approach on student learning outcomes.

Activity: Learners received a vertically integrated pathology curriculum; their pre- and post-course test data were collected.

Benefits of expressive writing in lowering rumination and depressive symptoms.

Depression-vulnerable college students (with both elevated prior depressive symptoms and low current depressive symptoms) wrote on 3 consecutive days in either an expressive writing or a control condition. As predicted, participants scoring above the median on the suppression scale of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003) showed significantly lower depression symptoms at the 6-month assessment when they wrote in the expressive writing versus the control condition. Additional analyses revealed that treatment benefits were mediated by changes in the Brooding but not the Reflection scale of the Ruminative Response Scale (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1991).

Exploring Asian American racial identity.

In this study the authors used cluster analysis to create racial identity profiles for a sample of Asian Americans using the People of Color Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (PCRIAS). A four-cluster solution was chosen: each cluster corresponded to one PCRIAS subscale and was named accordingly. Scores on the Asian American Racism-Related Stress Inventory and the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale were compared across clusters.

Turnover and organizational performance: a comparative analysis of the effects of voluntary, involuntary, and reduction-in-force turnover.

Data were collected from 31 regional subunits of a national financial services company to examine differential effects of 3 types of turnover (voluntary, involuntary, and reduction-in-force) on measures of organizational subunit performance. Although each form of turnover exhibited adverse effects on subunit performance when examined separately, partial correlation results revealed greater and more pervasive adverse effects for reduction-in-force turnover (i.e.