Aphasia Sufferers’ Displays of Affect in Conversation

Abstract

How do people with aphasia express their emotions? This article uses a sample of video-recorded speech and language therapy sessions to see how patients make use of facial, vocal, and bodily expression. Analysis shows that their affect displays regularly co-occur with linguistic difficulties and efforts to repair them. The most common affect displays consist of frowning, laughing, smiling, and shifts in gaze or body posture. If the difficulties are prolonged, affect displays are intensified with lowered/raised voice quality, sighing, head shaking, and verbal exclamations. Both frowning and laughter display recognition of linguistic difficulties, thus turning the threatening display of linguistic incompetence into a display of competence and active management of the trouble. The therapists are neutral in displaying affect but reciprocate smiles and laughter. The way that patient and therapist manage their displays of affect are part of their management of their larger social identities. Data are in Finnish with English translation.

Notes

¹ Affect displays were also used for reflecting the speaker’s stance toward a topic or telling in progress, but they are not in the focus of the present analysis. They occur in any conversation and have been examined elsewhere (see, e.g., Ruusuvuori & Peräkylä, 2009).

² In Finnish, interjection voi indexes affective stance and can be translated as “oh” or “dear” in the absence of a more-precise equivalent (Hakulinen & Sorjonen, 2012). Unlike “oh,” it is not a general change-of-the-state token but an affective interjection.

³ Grabbing the shirt in connection with uttering the word “washed” serves as a multimodal clausal construction, potentially referring to washing clothes, or laundry in general.

⁴ The institutional task of the speech and language therapist is to follow and evaluate the nature and quality of the client’s speech problems, and thus she opens up a conversation on familiar, everyday matters in the life of the client. However, for the client the frustration may be even bigger when she is not able to tell about these everyday matters. Furthermore, the question may also be a kind of test question, i.e., a question to which the therapist already knows the answer, as earlier at the beginning of the therapy session she has been told that the client’s husband had called about their “holiday plans.” Test questioning can be very distressing, which also may explain the intensified affect displays in this episode.

⁵ There are many kinds of approaches to aphasia therapy that may have different therapeutic practices and underlying institutional norms. Furthermore, there are many different kinds of aphasia, and the type of aphasia may also have an influence on the interaction and affect displays that emerge in it.