Pengaruh Expressive Writing Therapy terhadap Future Anxiety pada Mahasiswa Tahun Pertama

Abstract

Anxiety about the future in students is a state of fear, panic about changes that are expected to occur in the future. If anxiety in facing the future has arisen, it can affect students' attitudes, cognition and behavior and if this is not overcome, it will have a major effect on the performance of students, especially first-year students during the lecture period later. This study aims to see the effect of expressive writing to reduce future anxiety in students. This study uses an experimental quantitative approach that involves giving treatment in the form of expressive writing activities with a duration of 15-30 minutes for 5 consecutive days. The study used a pretest-posttest control group design and used the random assignment method (N = 10) on undergraduate students of the Faculty of Psychology, University of North Sumatra. Data analysis using the Mann U Whitney statistical test which shows a significance value of p value 0.53 (p> sig 0.05), meaning that doing expressive writing has no effect on reducing future anxiety in first-year students. The results showed that there was no significant difference in reducing future anxiety by doing expressive writing in first-year students, which means that other alternative interventions need to be sought to overcome future anxiety.