Linguistic-grammar profile of Polish patients with anorexia nervosa

Abstract

Background and objective

The process of diagnosing and treating anorexia is fraught with many challenges. Physiologically unstable patient status in the first period of treatment, the barrier between patient-therapist, and patient's resistance constitute an essential negative element in accurate diagnosis and appropriate therapy selection. For this reason, there was a need to create a tool using elements of natural language processing to support the psychologist's work in the diagnostic process to verify and validate the expert hypotheses.

Methods

The research proposed that linguistic-grammatical profiles be created among the research and control groups using elements of natural language processing. After the general part of speech tagging, the rules for detailed analysis were developed for adjectives, verbs (including the verb “to be”), pronoun “I” and the possessive pronoun “my”, cognitive words and characteristic terms related to body image. The choice of rules was dictated by the state of art and literature review. The obtained results were subjected to statistical analysis.

Results

A detailed analysis showed a strong negative sentiment associated with body image among patients with anorexia. In the control group, the same analysis revealed opposite results. In this group, people are aware of their physical imperfections, but it does not distort their body image. Statistically significant differences were observed in all concept categories except for the noun group. Statistical analysis was not conducted for the following concept classes: personal pronoun “I”, verb “to be” in the past form, verb “to be” in the future form, and general verbs in past form due to the insufficient number of occurrences of these concepts in the written notes.

Conclusion

The adopted NLP methods and the tools used in the designed projective method may be helpful in the psychological diagnosis of anorexia, due to the demonstrated differentiation between healthy and people with anorexia, providing detailed information about the patient and its required minimally invasive character.