Poster Summaries II. Human Development: Intersections with Psychoanalytic Perspectives: It's Hard to Say: The Challenge of Connecting Emotions and Language for First-Time Mothers

This research is driven by the question, How do people connect emotions and language? More specifically, How do people communicate their subjective experience of emotions verbally and nonverbally in a manner that creates personal relevance for the speaker, and allows others to vicariously experience such emotion?

Bucci (1997) postulates that people use three different systems to represent and process information, including emotional information. These three systems, the subsymbolic, the nonverbal symbolic, and the verbal, constitute her Multiple Code structure. The concept of the Referential Process is at the heart of this theory, as it provides a model of how people connect subsymbolic experience to verbal symbols. The Referential Process can be measured by the Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP) text analysis system (Maskit and Bucci 2005), which provides output for multiple dictionaries.

Bucci's work addresses the challenging question of how talk therapy works, but it has wider implications as well. A more general question it addresses is how one person comes to have an impact on