Ways people manage risks, social roles, and relationships in communicating about difficult emotions in hospice consultations

该项目将调查包括恐惧和痛苦在内的困难情绪在绝症背景下的沟通。我将研究一个现有的关于临终关怀咨询的录像语库，这些咨询涉及患有限制生命的疾病的患者、他们的同伴和医疗保健从业人员（HCPs：姑息医学医生、物理治疗师和职业治疗师）。先前的工作表明，这些当事人可以模棱两可地对待情感问题的沟通，关于他们是否以及如何成为焦点和明显的敏感性；这样做的一种方法是暗示存在情感上的担忧。与死亡有关的情绪是最难体验和沟通的。在这个项目中，重点将放在患者何时做出可以启动这种交流的动作上。这将有助于社会科学理解人们如何协商是否谈论以及如何谈论困难的情绪，建立并补充该领域的先前研究（Bericat, 2015； Peräkylä和Sorjonen 2012）。这个项目的方法论是对话分析（CA）。CA是一种严谨的方法，用于系统研究人们如何通过谈话进行社会互动。它被广泛应用于研究从业者和患者如何在医疗保健服务中相互作用。CA的优势在于它能够详细描述人们如何通过谈话和其他交际资源（如非语言）实施社会行动。CA提供了基于经验的见解，以了解参与者的行为如何反映和塑造更广泛的关注，例如对社会角色和关系的取向。该项目将为社会科学理解人们如何在互动中协商表达困难情绪提供新的贡献。本研究对应用传播学研究也有启示意义。

The project will investigate communication of difficult emotions including fear and distress in the context of terminal illness. I will examine an existing corpus of video-recordings of hospice consultations involving patients with life limiting illness, their companions, and healthcare practitioners (HCPs: palliative medicine doctors, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists). Prior work shows these parties can treat communication of emotional matters with equivocality regarding whether and how they should be a focus and marked sensitivity; one way of doing so is to hint at the presence of an emotional concern. Emotions relating to one's death are amongst the most difficult to experience and communicate about. In this project, the focus will be on when patients make moves that can initiate such communication. This will contribute to social-scientific understandings of how people negotiate whether and how difficult emotions are talked about, building on and adding to prior research in this area (Bericat, 2015; Peräkylä and Sorjonen 2012). The methodology of this project is conversation analysis (CA). CA is a rigorous approach to the systematic study of how people socially interact through talk. It is widely applied to studying of how practitioners and patients interact in healthcare services. The strength of CA is its capacity to characterise in detail how people implement social actions through talk and other communicative resources (e.g., the non-verbal). CA provides empirically grounded insights into the ways in which participants' actions reflect and are shaped by broader concerns, such as orientations to social roles and relationships. The project will provide novel contributions to social scientific understandings of how people negotiate the expression of difficult emotions in their interactions. The study also has implications for applied communication research.