Real and illusory sides of posttraumatic growth: indicators of cognitive change in redemption sequences

To date there is a controversy concerning the nature of posttraumatic growth (PTG): real or illusory? (Sumalla et al., 2009). This study examined this problem moving from the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Pennebaker’s differential emotion model (1997) and of McAdams’s identity narrative model (2001). Autobiographical sequences (means of words = 1095) of 40 mixed cancer patients were codified. The 100% used redemption sequences. The 26% used both positive and negative emotion words, the 37% used more positive emotion words and the other 37% used more negative emotion words. Surprisingly only the redemption sequences with more negative emotion words correlated with linguistic indicators of cognitive change (r =.82) (i.e. real PTG) while the redemption with more positive emotions did not correlate with linguistic indicators of cognitive and emotion processes (i.e. illusory PTG). These results highlighted the crucial role of cognitive processes to promote a real process of PTG