[Study of agency in the discourse of women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of domestic violence]

INTRODUCTION

In the absence of appropriate care, psychotraumatic consequences (revival, hyperarousal, avoidance strategies, dissociation and other clinical forms of post traumatic symptoms) can take control of a large part of the subject's existence (psychological, physical, social) and affect the ability of the victim to regain ground on the intrusions that harass, and to take up new life projects. More objective than the current semiological and psychometric approaches, and in the absence of biomarkers that may be used in clinical practice, psycholinguistics opens up an epistemological renewal of the conception of trauma and its clinical consequences, in particular through the definition of the Psycho Linguistic Traumatic Syndrome (SPLIT). If such conceptions have been developed based on the analysis of traumatic accounts of subjects injured in war and attacks, other forms of psychotraumatic confrontations also deserve to be considered. In this paper, our objective was to better characterize the pronominal forms of agency in the traumatic and non-traumatic narratives produced by women victims of domestic and/or sexual violence.

METHODS

Nineteen women aged 20 to 60 victims of domestic violence and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview) as well as a matched control group participated in the study. The subjects completed the French versions of Post Traumatic Checklist (PCL-5), Dissociative Experience Scale (DES) and Hospital and Anxiety Depression Scale (HAD). Traumatic and non-traumatic narratives were linguistically coded and scored on the SPLIT-10 scale.

RESULTS

Traumatic narratives contained significantly more first person singular pronouns than the non-traumatic narratives of controls or the non-traumatic narratives of psychically injured people. Traumatic narratives contained significantly more of the direct object pronoun "me" as well as indirect object pronouns. In traumatic narratives, the frequency of use of the subject pronoun "I" tended to correlate negatively with the HAD-A, HAD-D and SPLIT-10, while the frequency of use of the direct object pronoun "me" tended to correlate positively with DES, HAD-A, HAD-D as well as SPLIT-10. Finally, traumatic narratives contained significantly more verbs in the passive voice than non-traumatic narratives.

DISCUSSION

There was a gradient in the use of the first person singular pronoun that was inversely correlated to the degree of traumatic valence of the narratives: the control group used "I" less often than the psychically injured people who appeared to use this pronoun all the more as their narratives had a traumatic valence. In other words, even in the so-called "non-traumatic" narratives produced by subjects suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma seemed to be inscribed in the discourse, testimony to dissociation, as the seen in the correlation of this pronominal expression dimension of "I" with the SPLIT-10 scale. The use of the direct object complement was correlated with greater psycho-traumatic morbidity (dissociative, depressive and anxious) than the use of the "I", the latter remaining however a pathological mark instead of the use of the pronouns "we" or "one". Saying "I" translated less symptomatology than saying "me", but it was when the subject said "we" or "one" that he appeared to have returned to a normal discourse, no longer suffering from the torments of reliving or pathological dissociation. The identification of linguistic markers deserves to be pursued in order to better objectively describe post-traumatic psychiatric disorders, to better identify them in clinical practice in the field and to monitor the efficiency of the recommended psychotherapies. More generally, we may put forward the hypothesis that the direct modification of the patient's language, thanks to the intervention of the practitioner, from a speech composed of linguistic markers testifying to the trauma towards a normalized speech could help to treat post-traumatic symptoms.

Linguistic markers of processing the first months of the pandemic COVID-19: a psycholinguistic analysis of Italian university students' diaries

A longitudinal psycholinguistic study was conducted with 107 students from different Italian universities that produced daily photo-diary entries for two weeks, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the first Italian lockdown period, imposed in view of the rapid dissemination of COVID -19. The task was to take a daily photo accompanied by a short description (text). The texts accompanying the photos were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze linguistic markers representing psychological processes related to the experience of the pandemic and the lockdown, identifying potential changes in psycholinguistic variables useful for understanding the psychological impact of such harsh and extended restricted living conditions on Italian students. LIWC categories related to negation, anger, cognitive mechanisms, tentative discourse, past, and future increased statistically significantly between the two time points, while word count, prepositions, communication, leisure, and home decreased statistically significantly. While male participants used more articles at both time points, females used more words related to anxiety, social processes, past, and present at T1 and more related to insight at T2. Participants who lived with their partner showed higher scores on negative emotions, affect, positive feelings, anger, optimism, and certainty. Participants from southern Italy tended to describe their experiences from a collective and social perspective rather than an individual perspective. By identifying, discussing, and comparing these phenomena with the broader literature, a spotlight is shed for the first time on the psycholinguistic analysis of students at the national level who faced the first COVID -19 lockdown in Italy.

Linguistic Markers of Inference Generation While Reading

Words can be informative linguistic markers of psychological constructs. The purpose of this study is to examine associations between word use and the process of making meaningful connections to a text while reading (i.e., inference generation). To achieve this purpose, think-aloud data from third-fifth grade students ([Formula: see text]) reading narrative texts were hand-coded for inferences. These data were also processed with a computer text analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, for percentages of word use in the following categories: cognitive mechanism words, nonfluencies, and nine types of function words. Findings indicate that cognitive mechanisms were an independent, positive predictor of connections to background knowledge (i.e., elaborative inference generation) and nonfluencies were an independent, negative predictor of connections within the text (i.e., bridging inference generation). Function words did not provide unique variance towards predicting inference generation. These findings are discussed in the context of a cognitive reflection model and the differences between bridging and elaborative inference generation. In addition, potential practical implications for intelligent tutoring systems and computer-based methods of inference identification are presented.