The Sensory-Affective Language of Recalled Transformative Experiences in Conflict Settings

Transformative experiences in conflict settings, which are rare, intense, and often negative events, are thought to impact personal and group identity by producing vivid autobiographical recollections rich in sensory details and strong affect (Whitehouse, 2004, 2021). Yet, relatively little known work has used quantifiable and scalable methods to directly examine the sensory-affective properties in written recollections of transformative experiences (van Mulukom, 2017; Pociunaite & Zimprich, 2023). It remains unclear if sensory-affective richness characterises recollections of transformative experiences, and how these properties relate to the experience’s transformative impact. The study aims to address this gap by developing and validating a novel method to examine the language in recalled experiences in conflict settings and its relation to the experience’s transformative impact, using established lexical measures of sensory and affective content (Brysbaert et al., 2014; Fenerci et al., 2025; Warriner et al., 2013). The language participants choose when recalling an experience reveals both the encoding of sensory and affective details in memory and their relevance to the experience’s significance. Using this method, we test whether (H1) the experience’s transformative impact positively predicts stronger sensory-affective language and (H2) whether transformative experiences are stronger in sensory-affective language compared with (H2a) non-transformative experiences and (H2b) the general lexicon. Sensitivity analyses will test transformative vs non-transformative contrasts, and exploratory analyses examine thematic properties, additional contrasts, and competing NLP methods. To test this, we use two existing datasets from recent and ongoing studies, providing diverse contexts for increased generalisability. In those studies, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants (N = 221) and Balinese Hindus (N = 339) participants provided written recalled experiences and reported the experience’s transformative impact. Balinese Hindus also rated the recollection on sensory-affective scales. We extract sensory-affective properties of the recalled experiences and test their relation to transformative impact and transformative vs non-transformative experiences. The study could provide evidence for the formation, content, and importance of sensory-affective properties in recalled transformative experiences, and help validate and fine-tune our novel language-based method.