Promoting Well-being in the Community through Writing Interventions: The Role of Emotion Beliefs and Work Ideology

The psychological well-being of our community and of our current and future workforce needs urgent attention. Mental health issues in Hong Kong have increased drastically in the past decade. For example, between 2009-2014, 1.9% of adults aged 18 or older reported having probable depression, but by 2019, the proportion had increased to 11.2% (Ni et al., 2020). Among the elderly population, over 10% showed depressive symptoms (Tsang, 2016), but less than half would seek help (HKSAR, 2017). Furthermore, 68.5% of university students reportedly have mild to severe depression, and 54.5% have symptoms of mild to severe anxiety (Lun et al., 2018). 

This project aims to examine how to promote the psychological well-being of different communities, ranging from university students to working adults and the elderly population, by migrating and developing low-cost scalable interventions that have been shown to be effective mainly in Western populations, namely, writing interventions (e.g., Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Kacewicz et al., 2007). Writing interventions are amongst the most discussed low-cost approaches to promoting psychological health (Demetrio & Borgonovi, 2007; Kacewicz et al., 2007; L’Abate & Goldstein, 2007). Two of the most commonly adopted methods are expressive writing (Pennebaker & Chung, 2007; Pennebaker & Susman, 1988) and gratitude writing (Dickens, 2019; Emmons & McCullough, 2003). Guided writing interventions reduce emotional distress and promote positive outcomes by fostering cognitive change through facilitating emotional expression (Klein & Boals, 2001; Ullrich & Lutgendorf, 2002), developing flexibility in the construction of the situations (Campbell & Pennebaker, 2003), and bringing in fresh perspectives (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). This project intends to deploy targeted writing interventions to promote psychological well-being. It also aims to examine individual (e.g., emotion expressiveness, King & Emmons, 1990; work ideology, Williams, 2000, Blair-Loy, 2003) and cultural (e.g., display of emotions, Matsumoto et al., 2009) factors that might influence the effectiveness of such interventions.