Poetry as a therapeutic medium in shaping mood

Czernianin, Wiktor

doi:10.1080/08893675.2016.1199513

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Mood was treated as the central dimension of change in a qualitative study using poetry about disability, which draws distinctions between nervous (i.e. emotional) arousal, energetic arousal (action readiness), and hedonistic tone (valence) 12 . Pettersson's user-focused study using poetry and short stories found six main categories of reading function reported by the four reading group participants who completed subsequent interviews: informational, escapist, social, perspective-creational, aesthetic, and therapeutic 13 .…”

Section: Therapeutically Relevant Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative methods for group bibliotherapy research: a pilot study

2022

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Background: Bibliotherapy is under-theorized and under-tested: its purposes and implementations vary widely, and the idea that ‘reading is good for you’ is often more assumed than demonstrated. One obstacle to developing robust empirical and theoretical foundations for bibliotherapy is the continued absence of analytical methods capable of providing sensitive yet replicable insights into complex textual material. This pilot study offers a proof-of-concept for new quantitative methods including VAD (valence–arousal–dominance) modelling of emotional variance and doc2vec modelling of linguistic similarity. Methods: VAD and doc2vec modelling were used to analyse transcripts of reading-group discussions plus the literary texts being discussed, from two reading groups each meeting weekly for six weeks (including 9 participants [5 researchers (3 authors, 2 collaborators), 4 others] in Group 1, and 8 participants [2 authors, 6 others] in Group 2). Results: We found that text–discussion similarity was inversely correlated with emotional volatility in the group discussions (arousal: r = -0.25; p = ns; dominance: r = 0.21; p = ns; valence: r = -0.28; p = ns), and that enjoyment or otherwise of the texts and the discussion was less significant than other factors in shaping the perceived significance and potential benefits of participation. That is, texts with unpleasant or disturbing content that strongly shaped subsequent discussions of these texts were still able to sponsor ‘healthy’ discussions of this content, as evidenced by the combination of low arousal plus high dominance despite low valence in the emotional qualities of the discussion. Conclusions: Our methods and findings offer for the field of bibliotherapy research both new possibilities for hypotheses to test, and viable ways of testing them. In particular, the use of natural language processing methods and word norm data offer valuable complements to intuitive human judgement and self-report when assessing the impact of literary materials.

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Section: Therapeutically Relevant Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative methods for group bibliotherapy research: a pilot study

2022

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“…But the affective dimension is not the only one present in a poem. Poems are also a way to express the psychological state of it's author, as indicated in [21]. Here, the article shows how poetry is used as a way to discharge the mood of it's authors.…”

Section: Poetry and Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

DISCO PAL: Diachronic Spanish Sonnet Corpus with Psychological and Affective Labels

Barbado,

Fresno,

Riesco

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Nowadays, there are many applications of text mining over corpus from different languages, such as using supervised machine learning in order to predict labels associated to a text using as predictors features derived from the text itself. However, most of these applications are based on texts in prose, with a lack of applications that work with poetry texts. An example of application of text mining in poetry is the usage of features derived from their individual word in order to capture the lexical, sublexical and interlexical meaning, and infer the General Affective Meaning of the text. However, though this proposal has been proved as useful for poetry in some languages, there is a lack of studies for both Spanish poetry and for highly-structured poetic compositions such as sonnets. This article presents a study over a labeled corpus of Spanish sonnets, in order to analyse if it is possible to build features from their individual words in order to predict their General Affective Meaning. The purpose of this is to model sonnets at an affective level. The article also analyses the relationship between the General Affective Meaning of the sonnets and the content itself. For this, we consider the content from a psychological perspective, identifying with tags when a sonnet is related to a specific term (p.e, when the sonnet's content is related to "daydream"). Then, we study how the General Affective Meaning changes according to each of those psychological terms. The corpus used contains 230 Spanish sonnets from authors of different centuries, from 15th to 19th. This corpus was annotated by different domain experts. The experts annotated the poems with affective features, as well as with domain concepts that belong to psychology. Thanks to this, the corpora of sonnets can be used in different applications, such as poetry recommender systems, personality text mining studies of the authors, or the usage of poetry for therapeutic purposes.

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“…It is rather characterized by its capacity to freely evoke emotions rather than merely describing them. Rhythm, choice of words, and line breaks create a work of art that speaks to the reader on a variety of levels (Czernianin, 2016; Kristeva, 1984). A poem needs to be experienced.…”

Section: Language As a Bridgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Buber (1962) emphasizes that human beings encounter each other in and through language, and poetry is one possibility for such an encounter. Since a poem can be simultaneously intense and “airy,” poetry enables expressions of a variety of emotions and moods that otherwise might be hard to articulate (Czernianin, 2016; Kristeva, 1984).…”

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confidence: 99%

The virtues of poetic writing: Implications for clinical practice—An interview study.

Pohl¹,

Punzi²,

Berwald³

2018

The Humanistic Psychologist

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In this study, we investigated the experience of writing poetry, and the virtues of the writing process. Seven Swedish poets, 4 men and 3 women, were interviewed. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis whereby 3 themes were identified. These were in touch with oneself, in touch with others, and creative joy. According to the interviewed poets, they explore various life experiences, memories, and emotions through writing poetry. While they describe the beginning of each writing process as an experience of intimacy, the poets report that they gradually become more distant from the text throughout the composition process. In the final editing phase, the poem has become separate from its author. The process is characterized by creative joy, authenticity, and a sense of presence, and the poet is able to communicate thoughts and emotions. The writing process and the clinical therapeutic process thus have similarities. Implications for clinical practice are discussed.

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Poetry as a therapeutic medium in shaping mood

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Quantitative methods for group bibliotherapy research: a pilot study

Quantitative methods for group bibliotherapy research: a pilot study

DISCO PAL: Diachronic Spanish Sonnet Corpus with Psychological and Affective Labels

The virtues of poetic writing: Implications for clinical practice—An interview study.

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