I'm not sure how new this really is, but it sounds cool. Psychotherapy has been using metaphors for centuries . . . and with the postmodern turn, language became the focus of many constructivist models.
If you ask me, and no one has, this is a confirmation of the foundational ideas in George Lakoff's body-based theory of metaphor.
Reference:A New Psychological Method: Metaphor Therapy
By Wray HerbertMany healing traditions make use of jars--variously called God jars, or resentment jars, or worry jars. The idea is that you can--literally--compartmentalize your troubles, and by doing so take away their emotional power. If this sounds like a lot of New Age gobbledygook to you, read on.
The practice is a form of metaphor therapy, which sees psychological truth in common metaphors like "bottled-up anger" and "buried sorrows." These figures of speech are not arbitrary, a growing number of psychologists believe; instead they are examples of the way abstract psychological states overlap with physical experience. Psychological scientist Xiuping Li and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore wanted to explore these ideas in connection with emotional regulation--specifically the possibility that the physical act of enclosing bad feelings might facilitate psychological closure on a difficult emotional experience.
The first experiments were quite simple. In one, the researchers asked a group of volunteers to recall (and write about) a recent decision that they regretted. Half of them sealed the written memory inside an envelope before handing it in, while the others simply handed it to the experimenter. Then they all reported their feelings about the event, including guilt, worry and shame. In a second similar experiment, volunteers wrote about a dream that had gone unfulfilled. Again, only half sealed away their recollections, and again they all later described how emotionally upset they were. The results were unambiguous, and identical in each study: Those who physically sealed away their bad experiences--even though it was just in a common envelope--had many fewer negative emotions afterward. The simple act of containing the emotionally charged memories appears to have defused them.
At least that's one interpretation. But the scientists wanted to be sure that it was specifically the act of enclosing negative memories and emotions that was alleviating distress. So they ran another experiment to clarify the findings. In this one, volunteers read a news account of a child's tragic death, and wrote about their emotional response to it. Then they wrote about something neutral--their plans for the weekend, for example. Half the volunteers sealed up the tragic story and their reactions, while the others sealed up their weekend plans, before doing the same kind of emotional inventory.
The purpose here was to see if simply sealing up anything would have the same tonic effect. It did not. Only those who sealed up their shock and sadness about the tragedy got relief from the act. The scientists did one more version of the study where some of the volunteers paper-clipped the distressing memory rather than sealing it up; and again this act failed to alleviate emotional upset. Apparently psychological closure really means closure--not clipping. As reported online last week in the journal Psychological Science, only the act of enveloping the emotional content worked.
So how does it work? It's not known for sure, but here's a hint. The scientists finished the study of the tragic news study by giving all the volunteers a pop quiz at the end--to see how much of the story they recalled. And guess what. Those who had gone through the act of sealing away the event and their feelings remembered fewer details of the event. That is, sealing up the emotional content appears to have diminished the actual memory of the upsetting event, contributing to the psychological closure necessary for putting the pain in the past.
Xiuping, Wie, & Soman. (2010). Sealing the Emotions Genie: The Effects of Physical Enclosure on Psychological Closure Psychological Science; July: first published on July 9, 2010;
Abstract
This research investigated whether the physical act of enclosing an emotionally laden stimulus can help alleviate the associated negative emotions. Four experiments found support for this claim. In Experiments 1a and 1b, emotional negativity was reduced for participants who placed a written recollection of a regretted past decision or unsatisfied strong desire inside an envelope. However, enclosing a stimulus unrelated to the emotional experience did not have the same effect (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we showed that the effect was not driven by participants simply doing something extra with the materials, and that the effect of physical enclosure was mediated by the psychological closure that participants felt toward the event.
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