[Writing about emotional dissonance in client experiences benefits human service professionals]

The present study examined whether burnout and negative ruminations of helping professional were reduced by writing about their dissonant emotional experiences. Twenty helping professionals were randomly assigned to either the experimental condition (writing about emotionally dissonant experiences for three weeks) or the control condition (without writing). The results revealed that participants in the experimental condition had significantly lower scores for emotional dissonance than the control group immediately and three weeks after the experimental intervention. Qualitative analyses of the content written by the participants showed that individuals who had more beneficial change on the score for emotional dissonance wrote more cognitive words. This correlation suggests that writing about emotional dissonance may facilitate cognitive restructuring of emotional experiences, which results in decreasing emotional dissonance.