The Use of Emotional Metaphors as an Index for Recovery Among Individuals with Acquired Brain Injury

Abstract

This paper examines the expression of emotion in narrative speech among individuals with acquired brain injury (ABI). We are particularly interested in the effects of ABI on the use of metaphor (c.f. Stroinska et al., 2014). Conceptualizing traumatic events and sharing them with others is crucial for prognostic purposes and reflected in the speech patterns of those who experience some level of post-traumatic growth (PTG). Emotion and metaphor constitute a relatively unexplored domain within the ABI community and merit further research given the prevalence of emotional disturbances following a brain injury. This study explores emotional valence (i.e. the ‘pleasantness’ of the emotions invoked) and concreteness (i.e. how perceptible the referent of the word is) in metaphorical constructions. Emotional norm data was analysed using a corpus of approximately 14,000 commonly used English words ranking valence and arousal (Warriner et al., 2013; Kuperman et al., 2014). Thirteen semi-structured interviews with ABI survivors were conducted at a rehabilitation facility eliciting narrative recall of traumatic events and their experience across three temporal representations, namely past, present, and future. Results highlight importance of demographic information in recovery outcomes, which in our study accounts for 32% of the variance in emotion. Measures of valence revealed significantly increased use of positive metaphor over time, while the analysis of concreteness indicated events further in time represented more abstractly. Together, the findings shed some new light on emotional outcomes following ABI and indicate possible uses that figurative language may provide in understanding PTG.