The Capacity of the Associative Experiment with Keyword Stimuli to Explicate the Doctors’ Communicative Intentions in the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Abstract

The novelty of the research is stipulated by the fact that at present no comprehensive psycholinguistic analysis of doctors’ communicative approach in relation to the subject, object, place of communication and the communicative event itself has been conducted. The issue of applying the associative experiment to explicate doctors’ communicative intentions has also remained beyond the scope of scientific research. This paper addresses the question of the relevance of key concepts’ associative fields representing a typical communicative situation in professional discourse to identify the communicative intentions of workers engaged in the doctor-patient relationship. The associative fields of key concepts conditioning the doctors’ communicative intentions in the field of pediatric cardiology have been studied in thorough detail. The associative experiment stimuli included: patient, doctor, cardiology, cardiac surgery department, congenital heart disease (CHD), surgery. These words and word combinations describe: 1) agents of medical communication (patient, doctor); 2) place of communication (cardiac surgery department); 3) subject area (cardiology); 4) subject of communication (CHD, surgery). The general sampling of the research comprised 300 associations to the proposed stimuli. As the study indicated, when modeling a typical communicative situation in cardiologist professional discourse important are: the persons involved (subject and object); qualities; tools / objects used in a communication situation; actions performed by communicants; as well as the evaluation of the communicative situation. Among other things, the presence of evaluative reactions (positive or negative) makes it possible to exclude the emotional burnout syndrome (emotional detachment) of the doctor which is characterized by muffled emotions, smoothing out the sharpness of feelings and experiences, and the absence of an emotional response. The basic method of this research is a chained association experiment with the registration of all associations of the respondents. The obtained data were interpreted with the help of Y. N. Karaulov’s semantic gestalt method. The hypothesis about the effectiveness of the associative experiment in identifying the doctors’ communicative intentions as well as in monitoring the evaluative component of these in professional medical communication has been confirmed.