Case study
Language, emotion and PTSD
Lead researcher. Mentor: Dr. Tina Sutton.
An IRB-approved study testing whether linguistic markers in written narratives predict the severity of anxiety, PTSD and depression symptoms.
Test whether word choice in written narratives tracks symptom severity.
A 152-person study linking word use in narratives to anxiety, PTSD and depression scores.
Problem
People describe the same kind of event in very different words. I wanted to know whether those differences track how severe someone's anxiety, PTSD and depression symptoms are.
What I ran
I designed an IRB-approved study in Qualtrics. 152 participants wrote narratives and completed symptom measures, and I analyzed the language and the scores in Python, Excel and Minitab.
Result
Participants with higher PTSD severity used more positive emotion-laden words but often negated them. Participants with lower severity used those words directly.
PTSD severity was linked to two processing styles, overaccommodation and assimilation.
I presented the work at the Eastern Psychological Association in March 2024 and at Psychonomics in November 2024. A manuscript is in preparation.
152participants2conference presentations in 2024Method
- IRB-approved study
- Qualtrics
- Python
- Excel
- Minitab
- Narrative language analysis
Manuscript in preparation: Altobelli, M., and Sutton, T. The Relationship between Language and Emotion: Examining Linguistic Narratives and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
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