Analyzing judgment in bipolar depression patients' narratives using syntactic patterns : a corpus-based study

Abstract EN

For years, the Internet has provided patients with mental health disorders with several platforms where they share their
personal experiences with their medical conditions.

This study aims at exploring online narratives shared by patients with Bipolar
Depression disorder where they self-report their medical diagnoses of the disorder and reflect on the hardships they go through
in their lives.

The study employs Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal Theory to examine the JUDGMENTS that patients make about
their behaviors and the behaviors of people around them.

In order to extract the JUDGMENT utterances from the corpus
of narratives, the study uses syntactic patterns that may yield evaluative utterances.

The results of the study show that judgments
which belong to capacity [i.

e.

, how (in)capable a person is] and propriety [i.

e.

, how (un)ethical a person is] measure
the highest scores among all other subtypes of JUDGMENT.

The study also provides a lexicon for the most frequent expressions that
convey JUDGMENT, which could be used to enrich the Appraisal resources.