Abstract
Doctor-patient interpersonality strategies have evolved considerably in recent years, mainly due to the increase in telephone and online consultations generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this type of interaction, the control and expression of emotions have a crucial influence on the adequacy and effectiveness of communication. Remote interaction makes this affective exchange even more complex than in face-to-face consultations. The present study aims to configure a comprehensive model for analysing the affective domain in virtual medical consultations, useful for English and Spanish patients and learners. With this aim, the most recognised theories on professional interpersonality are reviewed and applied to a corpus of doctor-patient interactions in Peninsular Spanish and British English, extracted from representative forums on the Internet. The analysis highlights how specific stance and register variation mechanisms positively and negatively influence the emotional domain in these communicative exchanges. The proposed model allows significant contrastive findings on the occurrence and intensity of sentiment markers in both languages. The results illustrate how doctors in Spanish favour a more cautious, detached and predictable encounter, while doctors in English use a greater number and variety of attitudinal strategies to achieve engagement, empathy and emotional comfort.
References
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Giménez-Moreno, R. (2020). Lexical-semantic configuration of ordinary relational identities in multicultural groups of university students. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21 (1), 102-117. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1833901
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Goldsmith, D. J. (2000). Soliciting advice: The role of sequential placement in mitigating face threat. Communication Monographs, 67, 1-19.
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Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold.
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Hyland, K. (2019, first published in 2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Bloomsbury Academic.
Kelly, P.A. (2020). The development of American Psychiatry's Professional Style: DSM-II's "Common Language". Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 3 (2), 220-248.
Kirschbaum, K. & Fortner, S. A. (2012). Medical culture and communication, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 5 (3), 182-189. http://doi.org/10.1179/1753807612Y.0000000010
Mahoney, M. (2015). Social Media Health Communication: A Cross-Cultural Investigation on the Motivations and Challenges of Using Participatory Technology to Communicate with Patients. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 5, 141-162.
Mapelli, G. (2015). La comunicación (e)-médico-paciente en los foros de salud. In L. Chierichetti and G. Mapelli (Eds.), Discurso médico. Reflexiones Lingüísticas, históricas y lexicográficas (pp. 131-150). CELSB.
Martin, J.R. & White, P.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation, Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
McNeilis, K. S. (2001). Analysing communication competence in medical consultations. Journal of Health Communication, 13, 5-18.
Ong, L. M., De Haes, J. C., Hoos, A. M., & Lammes, F. B. (1995). Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. Journal of Social Science & Literature, 40 (7), 903-918.
Salager-Meyer, F. (1985). Specialist medical English lexis: Classificatory framework and rhetorical functions. EMP Newsletter, 2 (2), 5-18.
Salager-Meyer, F. (2014). Origin and development of English for medical purposes. Part II: Research on spoken medical English. Medical Writing, 23 (2), 129-131.
Schmid Mast, M., Kindlimann, A., & Langewitz, W. (2005). Recipients' perspective on breaking bad news: How you put it really makes a difference. Patient Education and Counseling, 58, 244–251.
Staples, S., Venetis, M. K., Robinson, J.D., & Dultz, R. (2020). Understanding the multi-dimensional nature of informational language in health care interactions. Register Studies, 2 (2), 241-274. https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.19009.sta
Taboada, M. (2016). Sentiment analysis: An overview from linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics. 2, 325-347.
Taboada, M., Brooke, J. Tofiloski, M., Voll, K., & Stede, M. (2011). Lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis. Computational linguistics, 37 (2), 267-307.
Tagarev, T. & Ratchev, V. (2020). A taxonomy of crisis management functions. Sustainability, 12 (12), 5147. http://doi.org/10.3390/su12125147
White, P.R. (2015). Appraisal theory. In K. Tracy, C. Ilie & T. Sandel (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wiebe, D. J. & Korbel, C. (2003). Defensive denial, affect, and the self-regulation of health threats. In L.D. Cameron and H. Levelthal (Eds.), The Self-regulation of Health and Illness Behaviour (pp. 184-203). Routledge.
Wilson, D., Williams, M., & Butler, D. (2008). Language and the pain experience. Physiotherapy Research International, 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1002/pri.424
Xin Z. & Yansheng M. (2021). Trust me, I am a Doctor: Discourse of Trustworthiness by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation. Health Communication, 36 (3), 372-380. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1692491
Arroyo Menéndez, M. & Díaz Velázquez, E. (2021). Las tecnologías digitales en el ámbito de la salud: brechas sociales, accesibilidad y despersonalización. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 18(2), 95-101. https://doi.org/10.5209/tekn.75516
Bellés Fortuño, B. (2018). Evaluative language in medical discourse: a contrastive study between English and Spanish university lectures. Languages in Contrast, 18 (2), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.15018.bel
Bensing, J. M., Deveugele, M., Moretti, F., Fletcher, I., Van Vliet, L., Van Bogaert, M., & Rimondini, M. (2011). How to make the medical consultation more successful from a patient's perspective? Tips for doctors and patients from lay people in the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Patient Education and Counseling, 84, 3, 287-293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2011.06.008.
Bleakley, A. (2017). Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine. Routledge.
Bobicev, V. & Sokolova, M. (2018). Thumbs up and down: sentiment analysis of medical online forums. Proceedings of the 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) Workshop & Shared Task (pp. 22–26). Association for Computational Linguistics. http://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-5906
Bokolo A.J. (2021). Implications of telehealth and digital care solutions during COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative literature review. Informatics for Health and Social Care, 46 (1), 68-83. http://doi.org/10.1080/17538157.2020.1839467
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
Burleson, B. R. & Goldsmith, D. J. (1998). How the comforting process works: Emotional distress through conversationally induced reappraisals. In P. A. Andersen & L. K. Guerrero (Eds.), Handbook of communication and emotion: Research, theory, applications, and context (pp. 246–281). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012057770-5/50011-4
Caffi, C. & Janney, R. W. (1994). Toward a pragmatics of emotive communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 325-373.
Caffi, C. (1999). On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 881-909.
Cate, T. & De Haes, J. (2009). Summative assessment of medical students in the affective domain. Medical Teacher, 22 (1), 40-43.
Coombs, R. H., Chopra, S., Schenk, D. R., & Yutan, E. (1993). Medical slang and its functions. Social Science and Medicine, 36 (8), 987-998.
Giménez-Moreno, R. (2006). A new approach to register variation: the missing link. Ibérica, 12, 89-110.
Giménez-Moreno, R. (2020). Lexical-semantic configuration of ordinary relational identities in multicultural groups of university students. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21 (1), 102-117. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1833901
Giménez-Moreno, R. & Martínez-Sierra, J.J. (2017). Roles and registers in digital forum interaction: developing a communicative identity-based approach to register variation. RLA. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 55 (2), 143-167.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goldsmith, D. J. (2000). Soliciting advice: The role of sequential placement in mitigating face threat. Communication Monographs, 67, 1-19.
Gotti, M. & Salager-Meyer, F. (2006). Advances in medical discourse analysis. Oral and written contexts. Peter Lang.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold.
Haskard-Zolnierek, K., Martin, L. R., Bueno, E. H., & Kruglikova-Sanchez, Y. (2021). Physician-Patient Communication and Satisfaction in Spanish-Language Primary Care Visits. Health Communication. http://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1973176
Heifferon, B. & Brown, S. C. (2009). The rhetoric of healthcare: Essays toward a new disciplinary inquiry. Hampton Press.
Hernández Farias, D. I. & Rosso, P. (2017). Irony, sarcasm and sentiment analysis. In F. A. Pozzi, E. Fersini, E. Messina & B. Liu (Eds). Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks (pp. 113-128). Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-804412-4.00007-3
Hyland, K. (2017). Metadiscourse: What is it and where is it going? Journal of Pragmatics, 113, 16–29. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.03.007
Hyland, K. (2019, first published in 2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Bloomsbury Academic.
Kelly, P.A. (2020). The development of American Psychiatry's Professional Style: DSM-II's "Common Language". Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 3 (2), 220-248.
Kirschbaum, K. & Fortner, S. A. (2012). Medical culture and communication, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 5 (3), 182-189. http://doi.org/10.1179/1753807612Y.0000000010
Mahoney, M. (2015). Social Media Health Communication: A Cross-Cultural Investigation on the Motivations and Challenges of Using Participatory Technology to Communicate with Patients. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 5, 141-162.
Mapelli, G. (2015). La comunicación (e)-médico-paciente en los foros de salud. In L. Chierichetti and G. Mapelli (Eds.), Discurso médico. Reflexiones Lingüísticas, históricas y lexicográficas (pp. 131-150). CELSB.
Martin, J.R. & White, P.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation, Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
McNeilis, K. S. (2001). Analysing communication competence in medical consultations. Journal of Health Communication, 13, 5-18.
Ong, L. M., De Haes, J. C., Hoos, A. M., & Lammes, F. B. (1995). Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. Journal of Social Science & Literature, 40 (7), 903-918.
Salager-Meyer, F. (1985). Specialist medical English lexis: Classificatory framework and rhetorical functions. EMP Newsletter, 2 (2), 5-18.
Salager-Meyer, F. (2014). Origin and development of English for medical purposes. Part II: Research on spoken medical English. Medical Writing, 23 (2), 129-131.
Schmid Mast, M., Kindlimann, A., & Langewitz, W. (2005). Recipients' perspective on breaking bad news: How you put it really makes a difference. Patient Education and Counseling, 58, 244–251.
Staples, S., Venetis, M. K., Robinson, J.D., & Dultz, R. (2020). Understanding the multi-dimensional nature of informational language in health care interactions. Register Studies, 2 (2), 241-274. https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.19009.sta
Taboada, M. (2016). Sentiment analysis: An overview from linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics. 2, 325-347.
Taboada, M., Brooke, J. Tofiloski, M., Voll, K., & Stede, M. (2011). Lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis. Computational linguistics, 37 (2), 267-307.
Tagarev, T. & Ratchev, V. (2020). A taxonomy of crisis management functions. Sustainability, 12 (12), 5147. http://doi.org/10.3390/su12125147
White, P.R. (2015). Appraisal theory. In K. Tracy, C. Ilie & T. Sandel (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wiebe, D. J. & Korbel, C. (2003). Defensive denial, affect, and the self-regulation of health threats. In L.D. Cameron and H. Levelthal (Eds.), The Self-regulation of Health and Illness Behaviour (pp. 184-203). Routledge.
Wilson, D., Williams, M., & Butler, D. (2008). Language and the pain experience. Physiotherapy Research International, 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1002/pri.424
Xin Z. & Yansheng M. (2021). Trust me, I am a Doctor: Discourse of Trustworthiness by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation. Health Communication, 36 (3), 372-380. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1692491
Copyright (c) 2022 Rosa Giménez-Moreno, Alicia Ricart-Vayá
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