Stressors Exposure, Meaning Reconstruction and Emotion Improvement for Professional Football Club U-series Players——Based on Revised Expressive Writing

Objective: To explore the progress of expressive writing(EW) on stressors exposing and meaning reconstruction, and then to analyze the effects of EW on negative emotions in professional football club U-series athletes. Method: Based on qualitative research paradigm and quantitative data supplementary analysis, 28 mentally stressed U-series players were randomly divided into freestyle and structured expressive writing groups. The freestyle group received 5-week standard writing paradigm intervention,while the structured group received 5-week expressive writing intervention which integrated social support and ruminated thinking.The level of negative emotion, ruminated thinking and social support were measured by the scales at before and after the intervention. The Chinese psychoanalysis system “TextMind” was used to perform textual analysis of EW data. Results: The conceptual mapping of stressors showed that there were 36 first level words and sentences, which could be summarized into 12second level themes and described as 3 third level themes. As time went on, the emotional and cognitive word frequency were gradually increased in the freestyle expressive writing group, while the emotional and cognitive word frequency of the structured expressive writing group showed non-linear fluctuations. There were significant differences between the two groups in the total score of negative emotion and the post-test scores of each subscale, and the intervention effect of the structured expression writing group was better. Conclusions: The stressors exposed by professional football club U-series athletes through EW writing include competitive stressors in training and competitions, organizational stressors in clubs and teams, and stressors in life and learning.Both of the two EW methods can reconstruct the meaning of stressors by improving emotions and cognitive disclosure. The modified structural EW, which integrates social support and ruminated thinking intervention, can more effectively alleviate the negative emotions of professional football club U-series athletes.