A postdeployment expressive writing intervention for military couples: a randomized controlled trial.

The current study tested the effectiveness of a brief expressive writing intervention on the marital adjustment of 102 military couples recently reunited following a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Active duty soldiers and their spouses were randomly assigned to write about either their relationship or a nonemotional topic on 3 occasions on a single day. The resulting design included 4 couple-level writing topic conditions: soldier-expressive/spouse-expressive, soldier-expressive/spouse-control, soldier-control/spouse-expressive, and soldier-control/spouse-control. Participants completed marital adjustment measures before writing, 1 month, and 6 months after writing. When soldiers, but not spouses, did expressive writing, couples increased in marital satisfaction over the next month, particularly if the soldier had had high combat exposure.

RCT Entities:   Population Interventions Outcomes