According to a new study by Israel researchers from University of Haifa, posting blogs to express feelings and emotions is _ for children aged 13-17. Psychology professors Meyran Boniel-Nissim and Azy Barak have found that a teenager writing a publicly-viewed blog on the Internet is more effective for relieving stress rather than keeping a private diary. The study, published in the journalPsychological Services, supports that expressing oneself through writing can be therapeutic. To conduct the research, Boniel-Nissim and Barak randomly selected Israeli high school students who displayed a certain degree of stress. The teenagers were then divided into six groups. Two groups were asked to post blogs twice a week about their social difficulties, but only one of them was asked to open the blogs for comments. The next set of groups were also asked to blog twice a week to post about whatever was going on in their mind, again with one group allowing comments. The two control groups were asked to keep an old-fashioned private diary. The researchers then collected the blog posts and diaries to discuss the adolescents' emotional and social position. From the research, they saw that the greatest improvement in mood was with the bloggers who wrote about their personal troubles and allowed people to interact with their posts. The research also noted that the comments were mostly positive and constructive. Boniel-Nissim and Barak said that the commentators' interactions helped the bloggers while they were distressed. The conclusive research noted that expressing yourself on the Internet not only let others know what was personally going on with you, but also helped you figure out some things about yourself too. _  were selected for the research.
Those who blogged regularly. Those who suffered from stress. Those who had never blogged before. Those who had poor social skills.