Using Emotional Valence to Analyze Elicited Stories about an Important Event Told by Individuals with Aphasia in AphasiaBank

Individuals with aphasia have a range of losses that can include physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and communicative abilities. These can all impact how a person with aphasia conceptualizes their identity. Emotional valence can be used to reveal the underlying attitudes and feelings of individuals with aphasia. The valance of one’s story is a crucial part of understanding identity post-stroke. A discrete scale of valence: positive, neutral, negative was utilized to categorize language samples of an important event from the AphasiaBank database. Using this discrete scale, an analysis was conducted to determine the valence of each story and to explore various independent variables, such as type or severity of aphasia, which may have an impact on the telling of important events by people with aphasia.