Manifestation of Depression in Fiction

Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities

We propose to use affect as a proxy for mood in literary texts. In this study, we explore the differences in computationally detecting tone versus detecting mood. Methodologically we utilize affective word embeddings to look at the affective distribution in different text segments. We also present a simple yet efficient and effective method of enhancing emotion lexicons to take both semantic shift and the domain of the text into account producing real-world congruent results closely matching both contemporary and modern qualitative analyses.

Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature. Edit. Knaller, Susanne, Jandl, I., Tockner, G. & Schönfellner, S.. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017

This article focuses on affects and emotions that are constructed and conveyed to readers in depression writing. How can fictional texts evoke the experiential world of depression? How are the often distressing and unsettling experiences of depression mediated through writing? Phenomenologists and theorists of embodied cognition have in recent years emphasized the interaffective, interpersonal and embodied nature of depression (cf. Fuchs 2013a, Ratcliffe 2015). In these views, depression is understood as a disorder of “intercorporeality and interaffectivity” and as “a ‘detunement’ of the resonant body that mediates our participation in a shared affective space” (Fuchs 2013a: 219). The aim of this text is to show how this new understanding can help us to see why depression writing is able to evoke such powerful corporeal and emotional responses in its readers, and also how depression writing may point to the embodied and interaffective nature of the human mind, thus opening up new possibilities for understanding experiences of mental illness.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2010

In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.

Emotional Lexis and the Peculiarities of its Functioning in Fiction Texts // Высшее гуманитарное образование XXI века: проблемы и перспективы: материалы шестой международной научно-практической конференции. – Самара: ПГСГА, 2011., 2011

The article deals with the problem of the emotional lexis and the range of lexical units that is comprehended by the very concept of «emotional lexis». The degree of actualizing the potentional enotional meaning in a fiction text is also analized.

Synopsis: text, context, media, 2019

The general feeling of malaise, if not crisis, in Literary Studies forces us to urgently look for solutions that will bring the discipline forward. This article is a call for a concentration on fundamental issues in the study of literature, and at the same time for a more rigorous and accountable methodology in studying both the content and the form of literary texts as well as readers' reactions to them. Some illustrations of work in the area of Empirical Study of Literature are provided, showing how fiction is a powerful regulator of human emotion, especially by formal features of the text. Case 1 reports a study which looks at the influence of narrative perspective (internal focalization in the first place) on judgements of readers. Case 2 delves into the textual ingredients by which readers' absorption in a narrative world is enhanced. These ingredients are foremost of a kind that goes under the name of "foregrounding" devices in literary studies. The conclusion from the research is that texts that are rich in foregrounding are better able to elicit a more complex response , i.e., a more powerful impact, from readers. In its turn Case 3 looks at how readers react to literary pieces dealing with deep human suffering. The findings indicate that literature is able to evoke strong feelings of empathy through its formal make-up. The results also support the argument that one's exposure to literature is the main variable to have an impact on prosocial behaviour, irrespective of personality, gender, age or social situation. Thus we claim that literary texts exert a powerful influence on readers' value sharing, absorption and empathy, and the impact can only be studied empirically. The article shows a way out of the current crisis, not by just opening up a new fashion, in which literary texts are "inter-preted" in yet another way, mostly academically, but by taking literary texts seriously in their workings on the minds and hearts of readers-which is ultimately what texts are written for.

Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Archive ouverte HAL, 2014

This presentation has a broad focus on unconscious cultural transmission, and demonstrates it by looking at lexical representations in general and at AFFECT in particular in a corpus of one hundred "classic" Anglophone novels written between 1719 and 1997. Research into the lexical inventories of these texts reveals rules of semantic distribution, i.e., rules about what proportion of what kinds of words are found in any given novel. The rules emerge from the study of semantic networks in this corpus; the rules are seen as regularities across time among key semantic patterns. The patterns point to Whorf's observation about the locus of language: "This [linguistic] organization is imposed from outside the narrow circle of the personal consciousness. .. as if the personal mind…were in the grip of a higher, far more intellectual mind which…can systematize and mathematize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached" (Whorf, 257). As with other linguistic rules we follow without knowing that we are following-e.g., rules of syntax, of phonemes-this presentation suggests that writers follow rules of semantic distribution. These rules are transmitted and utilized unconsciously-to wit, they go through the brain without the mind's consciousness-hence the idea of "cultural neurology." The individual mind of the writer shapes the linguistic material even while keeping the semantic proportions that the brain deems necessary for the genre. The literary novels of this corpus embody and propagate a code, a semantic code, which in turn can inform us as to how the brain functions, not at the level of neurons, but at the level of how and how much information needs to be packaged in a text to be successfully delivered to a reader's brain. Novels are comprised of words, and among the words are family connections, that is, semanticconceptual groups-e.g., words that name parts of the body or actions of the body, or parts of a machine, or feelings, etc. The Historical Thesaurus of the OED (2009) defines the universe of words as falling into three superordinate areas: the external world; the mental world; and the social world. From these emerge twenty-six major semantic frames that in turn open up a half dozen times more. The schema developed in this project (teXtRays: ReadingSquared) is less complexly deep because the word world of the novel is far more constrained than the whole universe of discourse that the OED taps into. The major difference in the organization of words here is that the OED's "external world" is divided at outset into the "raw universe" and the "built world" as a way to more easily see the distinction between two areas of representation important to how writers frame the characters and their interactions in the social realm, and equally important for analyzing the texts for environmental observations or traces of labor, etc. For the purposes of examining the novels, the following large frame was used to separate words: 1) BODY-The Individual Human Body/Being; 2) CONSTRUCTED-The Socially Constructed Domain; 3) BUILT-The Materially Built World; 4) RAW UNIVERSE-The Natural World. These overriding categories open up into a constellation of fifteen subcategories, and these can be opened up into fifty-five sub-subcategories. [see graphic 1] Using the framework of four overarching categories, a dictionary was gradually developed by examining the novels for words that went into each of these semantic groups, which in turn went through several other siftings downward. The first dictionary of the project was derived in the opposite directionfrom individual mentions to categorical rubrics. That first dictionary was for the names (nouns) used for the body and all its parts. Reading novels and searching for body parts, I discerned about one hundred twenty names that were then chunked into five conceptual rubrics (e.g., HEAD, TORSO, etc.), and these categories opened up into nineteen subcategories. Having developed the dictionary-a word-net, a hierarchical conceptual array-it could be used with text mining software to search new texts which could be tabulated and charted-visualized. The four overarching constructs as they are charted out [see graphic 2] show us a very strong pattern of agreement over time: the Raw Universe (bottom band) and the Built World (top band) together occupy about 15% of the references. The largest roles are divided between the Human Body/Being (at about 45%) and the Constructed Social World (at about 40%). The proportions hold steadily in spite of individual differences. Even at this level of zoom, the visual data allows us to make some useful observations and generalizations about the nature of the novel, semantically and from the perspective of cultural neurology-more of which in a few paragraphs.

The steady growth of the discipline of medical humanities has facilitated better understanding of the symptoms and signs of mental health conditions and the feelings of the humans experiencing them. In this project, the arts have been seen as enabling re-

2020

Depression is the "leading cause of disability worldwide" (World Health Organization), and is known to affect children and teens as well as adults ("Anxiety and Depression in Children"). This thesis works toward a greater understanding of the current cultural landscape of depression through a close reading of direct and symbolic representations of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in Roddy Doyle's Brilliant and Claire Legrand's Some Kind of Happiness. The study investigates how authors depict the symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition (DSM-5), techniques authors use to prevent stereotyped or overgeneralized portrayals, and what authors' symbolic representations-Doyle's Black Dog of Depression and Legrand's inner darkness, poisonous fog, and Dark Ones-imply about lived experiences with MDD. The findings suggest that both novels depict eight out of nine symptoms listed in the DSM-5 excepting suicidal ideation, which is nevertheless hinted at or briefly mentioned. Both authors succeed in avoiding stereotyping and overgeneralization through different strategies: Doyle through his wide cast of depressed characters and Legrand through a combination of one depressed character's intimate, first-person narration and inclusion of other characters with different mental health challenges. Through symbols, each author also captures varied depictions of lived experience with depression, notably depressed mood, feelings of inappropriate guilt and worthlessness, fatigue, hyper-/insomnia, and a loss of interest or pleasure. Doyle's narrative is problematic because the responsibility (or at least ability) to save their depressed loved ones is placed on the children and because the entire city of Dublin is miraculously cured overnight. However, positively, much emphasis is placed on the importance of teamwork and community when facing the Black Dog. Legrand's novel illustrates both the short-term positive effects and long-term negative effects of Finley's coping iv strategies and the interference of self-stigma in help-seeking. Like Brilliant, this novel also stresses the importance of family and community support in working toward health. This thesis calls for other members of our global community to build on this research and fill gaps in varied and accurate representations of depression. v Lay Summary Because depression is so widespread even in children and youth, this thesis looks at how two novels, Brilliant by Roddy Doyle and Some Kind of Happiness by Claire Legrand, depict depression both in their characters' lives and through symbols that represent depression. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is used to check authors' accuracy in how they write about symptoms of depression. Both novels are found to be accurate, and each symbol (Doyle's Black Dog of Depression and Legrand's inner darkness, poisonous fog, and Dark Ones) represents and implies different ideas about living with depression, most notably that depressed people need community support. This thesis adds to an understanding of how depression is being portrayed to children and youth and calls for people to write, read, teach, and study more varied but still accurate stories about depression.

Is there a correlation between language and psyche? How does individual language use relate to the utter-er’s psyche and mood? A change in ways of reading and reception seems necessary as a departure from the language-psyche interplay. A literary text, despite being an aesthetic artifact at the outset, is composed of linguistic signs that can provide us valuable clues about the characteristics of the language in which it is written. Along with the recent trend of integrating sociological and psychological research into author/poet biographies, new ways of reading and (re)interpretation have emerged. Lay people as well as novelists and poets tend to use metaphoric language to express emotions. The well-known novel Dokuzuncu Hariceyi Koğuşu (The Ninth External Ward) by Peyami Safa, a preemi-nent Turkish novelist, known for his remarkable insights into human psychology, is the narration of the in-ner life of its depressed protagonist. Safa’s psychological analyses are very realistic. This paper describes the linguistic representamen and metaphoric structures depicting the depressive mood in the above-mentioned novel. The aim is to reinterpret the statements (énoncés) of the writer and to determine whether the novelist prefers certain metaphoric structures to express specific psychological contexts.

Cognition, communication, discourse, 2017

This paper addresses metaphor and focuses on the role of metaphor in conceptualization of emotion experience of depression. The objective of this paper is two-fold. It aims (1) to appease the criticism of negligence with respect to big data and real discourses that conceptual metaphor theory is presently facing and (2) to expose and analyse with a cognitive linguistic methodology metaphorizations of depressive emotions in psychopathological discourse. In accordance with this objective, the investigation behind this paper is fuelled by big metaphorical data recruited from pieces of modern English psychopathological discourse on major and manic depression recorded in the form of two single- author depression memoirs. Metaphors of depressive emotions and their entailments organize within these pieces ramified metaphorical systems that reflect subcategorization of emotion experience by the depressive mind. Metaphors in these systems are of various types; they are based on bodily and cultural experiences, have different cognitive functions and may be archetypal in nature. Their targets are distinct emotion concepts. Their sources belong to diverse domains of human experience. Metaphorical meanings for the depressive emotions expose qualitative aspects of emotion experience of depression in its variation and subtlety. Metaphors of depressive emotions in the data encompass creative and conventional conceptualizations. The data allow an assumption that whereas conventional metaphors perform the function of understanding an emotion experience and naming it, creative metaphors expose in this experience its most elusive aspects and their cognitive function is augmented by the aesthetic one. Apart from implications for cognitive linguistics, the findings summarized in this paper are suggestive for research in phenomenology of depression, in clinical psychology and psychopathology and in cognitive poetics and literary theory and criticism. In prospect, this paper will grow into a larger-scale research on the issue of metaphorical creativity.