Linguistic Markers of Processing Trauma Experience in Women’s Written Narratives During Different Breast Cancer Phases: Implications for Clinical Interventions

Abstract

Research into the change processes underlying the benefits of expressive writing is still incomplete. To fill this gap, we investigated the linguistic markers of change in cognitive and emotional processing among women with breast cancer, highlighting the differences and peculiarities during different treatment phases. A total of 60 writings were collected from 20 women: 10 receiving chemotherapy and 10 receiving biological therapy. We performed a series of repeated measures ANOVA for the most meaningful LIWC linguistic categories, including positive/negative emotions and cognitive processes, to assess change over three sessions. Results demonstrated a significant increase in the positive emotions category for the entire group of women, with particular relevance for the biological therapy group of women, and a marginally significant (p = .07) greater use of words indicating cognitive processes for women receiving biological therapy. For the negative emotions category time was significant for the whole group of women, showing a peak of use in the second session of writing. Peculiar differences in the linguistic markers of processing trauma were observed between the two groups. Although the writing intervention is a support for both groups of women, it seems to be beneficial when there is a large time gap since the administration of chemotherapy and, thus, when the patient can revisit the experience. The relationship of the illness with life can be rearticulated, and the writing becomes a space for resignifying the traumatic cancer experience.

Using social media to explore the linguistic features in female adults with childhood sexual abuse by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

“…We explain that people with traumatic experiences have more empathy than the control group because they have suffered misfortunes. Unlike previous studies (Martino, Onorato, & Freda, ), our study found the CSA group was less likely to mention negative emotional and anxiety words. And the former also mentioned that the CSA group tended to have less verbal expression including emotional words expression.…”

Underfifty Women and Breast Cancer: Narrative Markers of Meaning-Making in Traumatic Experience

“…A diagnosis of breast cancer is considered a potential traumatic event associated with physical and psychological effects (Martino et al, 2013, 2015; Villani et al, 2016) that may also occur after the end of medical treatments (Cordova et al, 2007; Elklit and Blum, 2011). Cancer has a specific and peculiar nature because of the difficulty of recognizing a unique stressful.…”

“…Within a socio-constructivist and semiotic perspective, (Salvatore and Freda, 2011; Valsiner, 2014; Salvatore, 2016) the traumatic condition is due to the sudden and unexpected alteration of basic elements governing the relation between women and the external world (Janoff-Bulman, 2004; Joseph and Linley, 2005) and rupture of the temporal continuity resulting in a crisis of meaning processes that support the personal self-narrative of life (Brockmeier, 2000; Neimeyer, 2004, 2006; Martino et al, 2015; Carlino and Margherita, 2016).…”

Longitudinal effect of emotional processing on psychological symptoms in women under 50 with breast cancer

“…Breast cancer is a traumatic stressor for younger women because it is often more aggressive, lethal and destructive to daily life and to their own vision of the world (Yazdani-Charati et al, 2019). Women under the age of 50 show more emotional distress, anxiety, and depression symptoms and lower vigour for aggressiveness of chemotherapy received, regardless of the surgical procedure or tumour evaluation time (Martino et al, 2015; Mosher and Danoff-Burg, 2006). Studying the potential traumatic nature of breast cancer, Cordova et al (2007) showed that age is inversely associated with the perception of a positive change after cancer (Bower et al, 2005; Manne et al, 2004).…”