Integrating emotion in the case of aphasia after trauma: Investigating inclusion/exclusion as discursive practices

This study investigates routines and emotion displays mainly in a care home setting, where some of the participants have severe acquired brain injury. Aphasia is investigated in situations in which affect and emotion is relevant, for example cases of compliance and non-compliance to having memorized something “wrong” or ”correctly” and other cases of persuasion.

The data excerpts presented are transcripts based on participant video observation. The main interest is to scrutinize the emotional consequences of arguing with aphasia. This study is part of a collaborative study of aphasic communication.

The organization of talk after trauma is often characterized as ‘atypical’ in its organizational patterns. ‘Atypical communication’ represents the current data-driven analytical discourse in rehabilitation studies and health communication. Unfortunately, people with brain injuries are more than likely to be excluded from societal everyday life. Therefore, the research questions are limited to questions about the life-world of aphasia and the interactional consequences which may lead to inclusion/exclusion.

Many other units than linguistic units are central to meaning-making with persons with acquired brain injury, ABI: Embodied talk, multimodal units such as gesturing, pointing, gazing and bodily posture, the handling of objects etc. However, critical emotional displays seem to depend on circumstantial factors - which situation, persons, purpose or the challenge there is at stake (to win the argument versus being polite etc.) - rather than retrievable interactional/organizational patterns. 

Moreover, the study explores the pros and cons of a possible new cross-interdisciplinary approach between ‘augmented’ conversation analysis and an applied integrational linguistic perspective.

Could micro-social factors, macro-social factors and the history of a person’s interactional behaviour be used to investigate communicative habits as they are displayed under various circumstances?

Finally, could a new approach help distinguish the experienced communication as practiced by the participants from the analyst’s interpretations? These are the questions I seek to explore in my talk and in my integrational approach to linguistic impairment and aphasia.