An empirical study of verb use as indicator of emotional access in therapeutic discourse.

Abstract

Verbs are the primary linguistic vehicles connecting one to his or her affective bodily core. Previous studies have shown that an increase in patient's verb repetitions in psychoanalysis is indicative of sensory affective arousal that cannot be narrated in words. If the treatment is operating effectively, the patient can use the therapeutic medium to transform the raw affect into a coherent emotional narrative. Using this premise, this study empirically investigated the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic treatment, whose success has been controversial in the past. Using a single-case design with primarily quantitative linguistic methods, measures of verb repetitions, affect dictionaries, and a computerized measure of Referential Activity (a measure of imagistic emotional language) were applied to verbatim recordings of 30 psychoanalytic sessions representing different years of treatment. Results showed that the verb repetition measure was able to differentiate significantly the sessions in terms of level of affective arousal, and there was a significant decrease in mean verb repetitions across the year. Further quantitative and clinical analyses supported that an increase in the repetition of action verbs and affective verbs was associated with intense affective sensory arousal that disrupts the patient's ability to think where as an increase in stative verb repetitions helped the patient organize a meaningful emotional narrative. Results suggest that a systematic study of verbs can reveal crucial information about patient's affective states and provide pointers for the clinicians in terms the kinds of interventions needed according to the patient's linguistic choices.

Towards text mining therapeutic change: A systematic review of text-based methods for Therapeutic Change Process Research

“…The rule-based approach was also used to distinguish differences between linguistic measures and outcome measures was examined in high and low verbalized affect segments [61]. Others used the rule-based approach to show the correlation between verb repetition and differences in affective arousal [68]. This approach comes with the advantage that the researcher has direct control on what is extracted from the text.…”

Transference interpretations as predictors of increased insight and affect expression in a single case of long-term psychoanalysis

“…The sessions examined in the current study were taken from a case known as Mrs. C in the psychoanalytic literature and has been studied previously by various researchers (Ablon & Jones, 2005 ; Halfon, Fisek, & Cavdar, 2017 ; Halfon & Wenstein, 2013 ; Jones & Windholz, 1990 ). Mrs. C was in psychoanalysis for six years, yielding nearly 1,100 hours of which were all audio-taped (Jones & Windholz, 1990 ).…”

“…On the analyst’s part, he became more active in interpreting Mrs. C’s defenses and recurrent relationship patterns over the course of the treatment. More recently, Halfon and Weinstein ( 2013 ) and Halfon, Fisek and Cavdar ( 2017 ) studied 30 sessions from the 70 studied by Jones and Windholz ( 1990 ) and found an improved capacity on the part of the patient to verbally express her emotions throughout her analysis.…”

What Works When for Whom? A methodological reflection on Therapeutic Change Process Research

“…The rule-based approach was also used to distinguish differences between linguistic measures and outcome measures was examined in high and low verbalized affect segments (Anderson et al, 1999). Others used the rule-based approach to show the correlation between verb repetition and differences in affective arousal (Halfon et al, 2017). This approach comes with the advantage that the researcher has direct control on what is extracted from the text.…”

“…Others stream C researchers proposed software to study theoretical constructs (Anderson et al, 1999;Bucci & Maskit, 2007;Halfon et al, 2016;Halfon et al, 2017;Nitti et al, 2010;Salvatore et al, 2012): examples include the study of affect, Discourse Flow Analysis ("the present work is an attempt to improve quality research into the therapeutic process by means of the combination of statistical methodologies, enabling clinical interaction to be analysed"), and Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping ("the development of the efficacy and efficiency of methods of textual analysis is worth considering" . .…”