The Expressive Writing Study is an intervention designed for middle-school youth exposed to community violence.  The intervention is based on an integrative model developed by Steve Lepore and colleagues.  According to this model, writing about traumatic or stressful events can facilitate self-regulation, mainly through enhanced regulation of emotions. The model begins with the observation that dysregulated emotion—either excessively controlled or excessively uncontrolled emotion—is associated with poorer health outcomes, and expressive writing confers health benefits by regulating extreme emotional responses. Specifically, expressive writing regulates emotions by directing attention, promoting habituation or desensitization to distressing traumatic stimuli, and promoting cognitive reappraisals of the traumatic event. Each of these regulatory processes can have a positive impact on emotional responses in three channels: subjective, physiological, and behavioral. In our intervention, 17 7th-grade classrooms were randomly assigned to either a control writing condition (writing about non-emotional topics), a standard expressive writing condition (writing about one’s deepest thoughts and feelings concerning violence or other stressors), and an enhanced expressive writing condition (writing about one’s deepest thoughts and feelings concerning violence then sharing those with classmates, if desired).  Students wrote for up to 20 minutes during 8 sessions over a 4-week period.  Data was collected from students and teachers before the start of the intervention, and 2- and 6-months following the intervention. Following the intervention, we conducted focus groups with students and teachers to understand what went well with implementation, and what could be improved.  Currently we are in the process of analyzing the quantitative data collected in the study, and also are coding the students’ essays.