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.