ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
The Effects of Trauma and Non-Trauma Literature on Relieving PTSD of Chinese Undergraduates—A Randomized Controlled Trial
Provisionally accepted
Ruikai Yuan1
Mengjie Li2*- 1National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia
- 2Sichuan University of Media and Communication, Chengdu, China
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Traditional psychological interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) face limitations in university settings due to resource constraints, stigma, and low student engagement. This randomized controlled trial explored the effectiveness of reading-based interventions—trauma literature, non-trauma literature, and a control condition—on PTSD symptoms among 105 Chinese university students. Over an 8-week period, the trauma literature group showed the largest reduction in PTSD symptoms (p<.001), followed by the non-trauma literature group (p<.001), with minimal change in the control group (p<.01). Path analysis revealed that reading self-efficacy significantly predicted emotional empathy, which in turn predicted lower PTSD symptoms, indicating a partial mediating effect. These results suggest that exposure to traumatic reading could reduce PTSD symptoms, and structured reading, especially trauma narratives, can serve as a low-cost, scalable intervention to reduce PTSD symptoms and improve emotion regulation through enhanced reading efficacy and empathy. This study offers new evidence supporting bibliotherapy as a feasible and effective alternative for psychological support in higher education.
Keywords: PTSD, Bibliotherapy, trauma literature, reading self-efficacy, Empathy, university students, randomized controlled trial
Received: 08 May 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yuan and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mengjie Li, 526629936@qq.com
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