Referential activity levels in the main clinical diagnoses

According to Bucci’s multiple code theory the referential process is the process by which nonverbal experience is connected to language. The main measure of this process is the Referential Activity (RA). We hypothesized that a) in the conversation of different diagnostic groups the referential activity levels are diversified, b) when the patients talk about their symptoms a higher level of RA will occur than when they talk about other aspects of their life, and this will vary with the nature of the disorder, c) the referential process, which involves high RA followed by Reflection will also vary among the diagnostic groups. We are testing these hypotheses by applying Italian computerized measures of the referential process (Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary-IWRAD; Reflection, Affect and Disfluency measures) to the first counseling session of 75 subjects divided into five groups with different psychopathologies: respectively 15 with a phobic disorder, 15 with a obsessive-compulsive disorder, 15 with an eating disorder, 15 with a mood disorder and 15 without symptoms that ask for a consultation for life problems. The study is still ongoing but the preliminary results show that we can distinguish patients with different diagnoses by linguistic measures of referential activity. The verification of our hypotheses could lead to new confirmations of the multiple code theory and to a its specification in the psychopathology field.