KEEP A DIARY, REAP COGNITIVE REWARDS

Focuses on the cognitive benefits of keeping a journal. Relationship between working memory and academic performance; Description of a research undertaken among college freshmen in the U.S.

By Julie Adams, published on March 01, 2002

INTROSPECTION

Stressed out? Write it out! Keeping a journal can jump-start your working memory--which impacts attention and problem-solving--and may improve academic performance, according to Kitty Klein, Ph.D., a psychology professor at North Carolina State University.

"Stressful events compete for attentional resources," explains Klein. "If you can't concentrate on something, you have all kinds of problems."

The researchers asked 71 college freshmen to write about adjusting to college, a stressful event, or to keep track of daily activities, decidedly less stressful. Each group wrote for 20 minutes on three occasions. After seven weeks, working memory skills were evaluated with arithmetic and vocabulary tests

Subjects who wrote about stressful feelings scored higher than those who simply recorded the days' events.

To find out why, Klein instructed 111 students to write about an extremely negative or extremely positive experience with the caveat that they think deeply about the subject. A control group focused on a neutral experience: time management.

Three months later, students who had written about unpleasant events reported a significant decrease in intrusive thoughts related to the experience. In addition, their working memories improved by 11 percent and their GPAs improved during that semester and the next.

The other groups showed little improvement in working memory or GPA. The results were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.