Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health

Date Submitted: Jun 13, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 20, 2018 - Jul 25, 2018
Date Accepted: Sep 16, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial

Smyth JM, Johnson JA, Auer BJ, Lehman E, Talamo G, Sciamanna CN

Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial

JMIR Ment Health 2018;5(4):e11290

DOI: 10.2196/11290

PMID: 30530460

PMCID: 6305886

Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial

  • Joshua M Smyth; 
  • Jillian A Johnson; 
  • Brandon J Auer; 
  • Erik Lehman; 
  • Giampaolo Talamo; 
  • Christopher N Sciamanna

ABSTRACT

Background:

Positive affect journaling (PAJ), an emotion-focused self-regulation intervention, has been associated with positive outcomes among medical populations. It may be adapted for Web-based dissemination to address a need for scalable, evidence-based psychosocial interventions among distressed patients with medical conditions.

Objective:

This study aimed to examine the impact of a 12-week Web-based PAJ intervention on psychological distress and quality of life in general medical patients.

Methods:

A total of 70 adults with various medical conditions and elevated anxiety symptoms were recruited from local clinics and randomly assigned to a Web-based PAJ intervention (n=35) or usual care (n=35). The intervention group completed 15-min Web-based PAJ sessions on 3 days each week for 12 weeks. At baseline and the end of months 1 through 3, surveys of psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being were completed.

Results:

Patients evidenced moderate sustained adherence to Web-based intervention. PAJ was associated with decreased mental distress and increased well-being relative to baseline. PAJ was also associated with less depressive symptoms and anxiety after 1 month and greater resilience after the first and second month, relative to usual care.

Conclusions:

Web-based PAJ may serve as an effective intervention for mitigating mental distress, increasing well-being, and enhancing physical functioning among medical populations. PAJ may be integrated into routine medical care to improve quality of life. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01873599; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01873599 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/73ZGFzD2Z)


 Citation

Please cite as:

Smyth JM, Johnson JA, Auer BJ, Lehman E, Talamo G, Sciamanna CN

Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial

JMIR Ment Health 2018;5(4):e11290

DOI: 10.2196/11290

PMID: 30530460

PMCID: 6305886

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.