Analyzing Appraisal in Major and Bipolar Depression Patients’ Narratives in Mental Health Forums: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

The present study investigated the language of Appraisal in the written narratives of individuals diagnosed with one of two mental health disorders, namely, Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD). The study aimed at revealing how these individuals feel about themselves, i.e., the types of emotion that characterize their narratives, how they judge others, and how they appreciate phenomena related to their disorders. Hence, the study adopted as its theoretical framework the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) with its three attitude sub-systems of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. To do so, narratives written by patients who self-reported their diagnoses with either disorder were collected form online mental health forums. These narratives were then combined in two separate corpora: MDD corpus and BD corpus. For the purposes of locating expressions of Attitudinal evaluation in the two corpora, corpus analytic tools were used with the help of syntactic fields of adjectives. The analysis showed that patients of both disorders mainly focused on Judgment in their evaluations. Evaluations from Affect were found to be more frequent than Appreciation in the BD narratives, whereas Appreciation was more frequent in the MDD narratives. The subcategories of Capacity and Propriety encompassed most of the Judgment evaluations in MDD and BD narratives. Also, Pleasure, Misery, and Fear were, respectively, the three most frequent types of emotion in both corpora. With regard to Appreciation, the subtypes of Complexity, Valuation, and Quality were, respectively, the most frequent.