1.2. Linguistic Markers of Psychological Adjustment
fatigue, mental disorders, peritraumatic, traumatic, PTSD, verbal behaviors, trauma
STRESSFUL EVENTS
Healthcare professionals should be the first to recognize the onset of mental fatigue, yet their difficult working conditions and the fear of social stigmatization often prevent them from seeking psychological support [Social, personality, and psychopathology research has often focused on the use of language, establishing that manifested verbal behaviors can offer key information about an individual’s emotional, physical, and mental state. The concept that people’s words may reflect how they are feeling is not new [While language is now widely assumed to act as a psychological marker, there is still little agreement about the most suitable methods for studying language use (see [An alternative perspective is that of quantitative analysis, which has attracted increasing interest over the last 50 years and is based on the idea that given characteristics of language or word use may be counted and statistically analyzed [Studies underpinned by a quantitative perspective often draw on computerized linguistic analysis, which involves counting the words in a given sample of text and grouping them into predefined categories. Mental health research has used quantitative word counting techniques to identify, analyze, and treat a range of symptoms. Speech style analysis has been used to discriminate between different mental disorders [The quantitative approach has also been applied in traumatic memory studies [Although the expressive writing method has been compared to exposure-based therapies as a means of alleviating PTSD symptoms [In an earlier study with 66 healthcare practitioners, Tonarelli and colleagues [In a previous study of our own [The studies just reviewed were designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the EW paradigm and investigate the mechanisms underpinning its impact on mental health status. Such research can inform the provision of timelier and more cost-effective treatment for traumatized subjects by identifying those in need of long-term intervention and suggesting what the focus of psychotherapy treatments should be. To this end, past studies have identified linguistic markers of the mental processes involved in the elaboration of stressful events.One process that has been widely investigated is cognitive elaboration. Cognitive models [The role of emotional elaboration in trauma narratives has also been investigated [Other processes implicated in the development of PTSD include peritraumatic mental defeat, which consists in the complete loss of inner resistance [Finally, self-immersed processing, which is linguistically marked by the use of first-person singular pronouns (“I,” “me.” “my”) [