Seminar 13/07/2017

Food Behavioral Disorders (FBD) represent a group of pathologies (e.g., nervous anorexia, nervous bulimia, uncontrolled eating) particularly common among teenage girls and young women. The central themes of these disorders concern the fear of putting on weight, restrictive diets, a distorted relation with their own body image and a difficulty in the recognition of their emotions (alessitimia).
Through some preliminary studies on language corpora from social apps and clinical interviews, it will be possible to expose important experiences, meanings and thoughts characterizing the vocabulary of this clinical population.
Specifically, the results of two studies concerning some specific experiences will be shown: proAna blogs and the experience of pregnancy of anorexic patients.
In the first case, through TLAB, the relations among the language contents collected from different proAna blogs will be shown, namely analyzing corpora from virtual spaces containing comments and thoughts of patients with FBD (or at the risk of FBD).
Secondly, the results of semi-structured interviews (verbatim) concerning the experience of pregnancy of anorexic patients will be shown through a phenomenological approach.
The meeting will be the occasion for a common discussion and for evaluating possible new perspectives and methods of corpus analysis with the aim of typifying the anorexic vocabulary.