Eva-Maria Gortner
02/12/16
Making sense of trauma: Linguistic Phenomena in the
Appraisal and Goal Processes Approach

Autobiography--narratives told by people who experience traumatic or highly emotional
events. These autobiographical narratives are organized around the narrator’s desire to come
to a better understanding of events. As such, they include emotions experienced and desires
to evaluate and deal with the harms suffered. The personal narrative is a communicative
device that allows the narrator to remember, communicate, and evaluate the events.

Narratives represent emotional, stressful, or traumatic experience. All of the narratives
contain appraisals (evaluations) that reveal the effect of the experience on the narrator's
psychological well-being.

When analyzing narratives, T. &S. focus on talk about emotional states, strategies for coping
with the events and emotions, beliefs about surviving aversive consequences of untoward
events, and the generation of new goals and plans to replace ones that are irrevocably lost.

The most important marker examined in the appraisal and goal processes paradigm are
emotions. Emotions, unlike general affective states, mood states, or personal dispositions, are
related to antecedent (causal) events, beliefs about the attainability of personally meaningful
goals, and plans of action that might be pursued. Some researchers (e.g., Pennebaker, 1999)
indiscriminately include all internal state words in narrative analyses, to predict assessments
of well being. Their findings (Stein et al., 1997), however, indicate that only emotion states,
their antecedents, and their consequences are linked to plans of action and are predictive of
psychological well-being. Although narrators use a rich array of internal state language to
describe past experience, the richness of their descriptions is not predictive of how well or
how badly things are going. The organization and experience of emotion, on the other
hand, does predict whether things are going well or badly.

This is because emotions signal that one or more goals has been attained, blocked, or
threatened. Goal appraisal processes are carried out through emotional experience.

This study analyzed narratives by male caregivers caring for and loosing a partner to AIDS.
Subjects narrated about ongoing present or past events that were stressful or traumatic.
Eva-Maria Gortner
02/12/16
Participants were interviewed and completed a series of standardized, self-report measures of
depressive mood and positive well-being.

The first goal was to code the emotions, events, beliefs, desires, and plans of action that were
reported by these participants in their narratives. The second goal was to determine whether
these constituents in the narratives predicted the psychological well-being of these
participants reported on standardized tests.
Method:

30 caregivers were interviewed prior to partner’s death and 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 12 months
after. The transcribed narratives were coded as to their appraisals, goals, and plans.

Narratives were parsed into clauses, each clause containing one main verb predicate along
with its arguments.

After clausal parsing, the clauses were further analyzed and organized into a series of goalbased episodes, including an initiating event, goal, action, and outcome. Caregivers focused
on eight types of episodes: problems associated with caregiving, problems in communication,
medical problems, mental health problems with either the caregiver or the partner with
AIDS, problems in coping with the dying process, difficulties that stressed the caregiverpartner relationship, difficulties of getting through daily life, and a miscellaneous category.

Clauses were categorized into functional categories: precipitating events, beliefs, values,
preferences, emotions, goals, plans of action, and goal outcomes.

Language of goals:

use of auxiliaries (wish, decide, going to do, try to do, must do).

Prepositional phrase attached to an action statement (to, for, in order to…) Ex: I read
some of his favorite short stories to him in order to relax him.

Language of goal outcomes: reference to the result or ending of an action.

I did it, I got it, I really blew it, It just didn’t happen.

I gave him a massage, and he felt better. Although I gave him medicine, he felt
worse.

Language of plan of action:
Eva-Maria Gortner
02/12/16

Use of conditional or future oriented verbs: I want to get going, here’s what I’d really
like to do. I am joining a support group so I can help others and meet new people.
Results

Caregivers experienced 4 positive emotion states (happiness, hope, pride, relief) and 12
negative emotion states in their narratives. Of the 12, 4 emotion terms accounted for more
than 90% of the emotional experience during the study (sadness, anger, fear, anxiety). These
data provide strong evidence that a small set of emotional terms is being used to describe
stressful experiences and the loss of a partner through death.

Emotions = sets of circumstances

The presence of positive appraisals (as measured by the proportion of positive emotions) and
positive plans (future plan of action) before a trauma are critical predictors of well being both
before and after the death of a loved one.

The three dimensions in bereavement narratives that were most predictive of depressive
mood at bereavement were: the proportion of fear emotions and the proportion of negative
beliefs about the ability of the self to cope without the partner

Individuals with high psychological well-being after bereavement could generate more goals
than those who did not improve, they were more likely to include positive appraisals of
themselves, and they were more likely to refer to positive things that they had learned from
the experience, even though the experience was traumatic.

The authors tested Pennebaker’s hypotheses that narrating helps individuals to recover from
traumatic events (Stein and Ross, 1996, 1997). They found that the facilitation of narrating
depends upon the conditions under which the narrative is told. Narrating under normal
conditions, where the focus of attention is on the self (I, me, mine) does not decrease
depression-rather it increases depressive mood. When adolescent narrators talked about their
traumas in the third person (he, she, her, him, etc.), however, the most depressed adolescents
before narration improved significantly compared to depressed adolescents who narrated in
the 1st person or who were not given a chance to talk about their traumatic experience.
Eva-Maria Gortner
02/12/16
Discussion

T&S state that episodes in trauma narratives show specific emotion states, which in turn
predict plans of action and psychological well-being. Other affective states, such as general
positive and negative feeling states, mood states, personal disposition states, mental states,
physical states, and preferences do not predict plans of action or psychological well-being.
The only internal state worth focussing on that depends upon antecedents, beliefs, and plans
of action is an emotion state.

In order to achieve plans of action and psychological well-being, many different types of
affective terms are not necessary. Artful depictions of emotion may not mimic reality, at
least in terms of how real people report upon the emotions they experience during their
traumatic and stressful events. A very limited affective lexicon is used and this limited set of
terms provides excellent diagnostic predictors of psychological well-being.

Personal narratives also reflect the structure and organization of emotional experience in
terms of emotions and their related appraisals, beliefs, goals, plans, and actions. Thus, the
purpose of the emotional narrative, especially for the enhancement of psychological being,
may be quite different from those fictional accounts constructed by a writer with different
purposes.
References:
Stein, N., Folkman, S., Trabasso, T., & Richards, T.A. (1997). Appraisal and goal
processes as predictors of psychological well-being in bereaved caregivers. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 72 (4), 872-884.
Trabasso, T. & Stein, N. (2000). Understanding and Organizing Emotional Experience:
Autobiographical Accounts of Traumatic Events. World Wide Web:
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/igel2000/ESA/stein.html