Do Patients With Depression Prefer Literal or Metaphorical Expressions for Internal States? Evidence From Sentence Completion and Elicited Production

In everyday communication metaphoric expressions are frequently used to refer to abstract concepts, such as feelings or mental states. Patients with depression are said to prefer literal over figurative language, i.e. they may show a concreteness bias. Given that both emotional functioning and the processing of figurative language may be altered in this clinical population, our study aims at investigating whether and how these dysfunctions are reflected in the understanding and production of metaphorical expressions for internal states. We used two behavioral approaches: a sentence completion task and elicited speech production. In the first experiment, patients with ICD 10 depression (n = …