Item Details

Quantitative metaphor usage patterns in Chinese psychotherapy talk

Issue: Vol 14 No. 1 (2017)

Journal: Communication & Medicine

Subject Areas: Healthcare Communication Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/cam.27688

Abstract:

The study of metaphor in psychotherapy is undergoing a ‘contextual turn’, shifting emphasis from global mechanisms underlying metaphors and therapeutic change to their naturally occurring properties in therapist–patient interaction. While there have been rich qualitative and contextual descriptions of metaphors in psychotherapy, complementary quantitative accounts of metaphor usage patterns over larger amounts of talk have been less forthcoming. This paper reports metaphor usage patterns as associations between key contextual variables which characterize metaphors in a dataset of Chinese psychotherapy talk. A total of 2893 metaphor vehicle terms from 29.5 hours of talk were coded for SPEAKER, FUNCTION, TARGET, PHASE OF THERAPY, and DYAD. A loglinear analysis revealed significant higher order associations (DYAD*TARGET*FUNCTION*PHASE; DYAD*FUNCTION*PHASE*SPEAKER; TARGET*FUNCTION*SPEAKER), discussed as usage patterns which bear implications for the psychotherapeutic application of metaphor. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Author: Dennis Tay

View Original Web Page

References :

Altman, D. (1991) Practical Statistics for Medical Research. London: Chapman and Hall.


Angus, L. E. and Korman, Y. (2002) A metaphor theme analysis: Conflicts, coherence and change in brief psychotherapy. In S. R. Fussell (ed.) The Verbal Communication of Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 151–165. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.


Angus, L. E. and Rennie, D. L. (1988) Therapist participation in metaphor generation: Collaborative and non-collaborative styles. Psychotherapy 25 (4): 552–560. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085381


Barlow, J., Pollio, H. and Fine, H. (1977) Insight and figurative language in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 14 (3): 212–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086530


Blenkiron, P. (2010) Stories and Analogies in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.


Cameron, L. and Maslen, R. (eds) (2010) Metaphor Analysis. London: Equinox.


Cashdan, S. (1988) Object Relations Therapy: Using the Relationship. New York: W. W. Norton.


Ceccagno, A. and Basciano, B. (2007) Compound headedness in Chinese: An analysis of neologisms. Morphology 17 (2): 207–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-008-9119-0


Charteris-Black, J. (2012) Shattering the bell jar: Metaphor, gender, and depression. Metaphor and Symbol 27 (3): 199–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2012.665796


Cirillo, L. and Crider, C. (1995) Distinctive therapeutic uses of metaphor. Psychotherapy 32 (4): 511–519. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-3204.32.4.511


Cohen, J. (1988) Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.


Dwairy, M. (2009) Culture analysis and metaphor psychotherapy with Arab-Muslim clients. Journal of Clinical Psychology 65 (2): 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20568


Elliott, G. C. (1988) Interpreting higher order interactions in log-linear analysis. Psychological Bulletin 103 (1): 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.103.1.121


Ferrara, K. W. (1994) Therapeutic Ways with Words: Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press.


Field, A. (2013) Discovering Statistics using SPSS. Fourth edition. London: Sage.


Frank, J. D. (1971) Therapeutic factors in psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy 25: 350–361.


Gelo, O. C. G. (2008) Metaphor and Emotional-Cognitive Regulation in Psychotherapy: A Single Case Study. Ulm, Germany: Ulmer Textbank.


Gelo, O. C. G. and Mergenthaler, E. (2003) Psicoterapia e linguaggio metaforico. Psicoterapia 27: 53–65.


Gibbs, R. W. (1994) The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Gilbert, N. (1993) Analyzing Tabular Data: Loglinear and Logistic Models for Social Researchers. London: UCL Press.


Hill, C. E. and Regan, A. M. (1991) The use of metaphors in one case of brief psychotherapy. Journal of Integrative and Eclectic Psychotherapy 10 (1): 56–67.


Hui, S. L., Slemenda, C. W. and Johnston, C. C. (1988) Age and bone mass as predictors of fracture in a prospective study. Journal of Clinical Investigation 81 (6): 1804–1809. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI113523


Kilgarriff, A. (2001) Comparing corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 6 (1): 97–133. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.6.1.05kil


Kimmel, M. (2010) Why we mix metaphors (and mix them well): Discourse coherence, conceptual metaphor, and beyond. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (1): 97–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.05.017


Kimmel, M. (2012) Optimizing the analysis of metaphor in discourse: How to make the most of qualitative software and find a good research design. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 10 (1): 1–48. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.10.1.01kim


Kopp, R. R. (1995) Metaphor Therapy: Using Client-Generated Metaphors in Psychotherapy. New York: Brunnel/Mazel.


Kopp, R. R. and Craw, M. J. (1998) Metaphoric language, metaphoric cognition, and cognitive therapy. Psychotherapy 35 (3): 306–311. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087795


Kopp, R. R. and Eckstein, D. (2004) Using early memory metaphors and client-generated metaphors in Adlerian therapy. Journal of Individual Psychology 60 (2): 163–174.


Kövecses, Z. (2005) Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511614408


Levitt, H., Korman, Y. and Angus, L. (2000) A metaphor analysis in treatments of depression: Metaphor as a marker of change. Counselling Psychology Quarterly 13 (1): 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070050011042


Li, P. (2002) Loglinear models for the analysis of language acquisition data. Journal of Cognitive Science 3: 27–41.


Low, G., Todd, Z., Deignan, A. and Cameron, L. (eds) (2010) Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Lyddon, W. J., Clay, A. L., and Sparks, C. L. (2001) Metaphor and change in counselling. Journal of Counseling & Development 79 (3): 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.2001.tb01971.x


McMullen, L. M. (1996) Studying the use of figurative language in psychotherapy: The search for researchable questions. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11 (4): 241–255. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1104_1


McMullen, L. M. (2008) Putting it in context: Metaphor and psychotherapy. In R. W. Gibbs (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 397–411. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Nicaise, L. (2010). Metaphor and the context of use: A multidimensional approach. Metaphor and Symbol 25 (2): 63–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926481003715978


Norcross, J. C. (1990) An eclectic definition of psychotherapy. In J. K. Zeig and W. M. Munion (eds) What is Psychotherapy? Contemporary Perspectives, 218–220. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.


Page, W. (1977) Interpretation of Goodman’s log-linear model effects. An odds-ratio approach. Sociological Methods and Research 5 (4): 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/004912417700500402


Pollio, H. R. and Barlow, J. M. (1975) A behavioural analysis of figurative language in psychotherapy: One session in a single case-study. Language and Speech 18 (3): 236–254.


Pragglejaz Group. (2007) MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480709336752


Rasmussen, B. M. and Angus, L. E. (1996) Metaphor in psychodynamic psychotherapy with borderline and non-borderline clients: A qualitative analysis. Psychotherapy 33 (4): 521–530. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-3204.33.4.521


Schiepek, G. K., Tominschek, I. and Heinzel, S. (2014) Self-organization in psychotherapy testing the synergetic model of change processes. Frontiers in Psychology 5 (Art. 1089): 21–31. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01089


Schmitt, R. (2014) Metaphern und Intervention: Eine Skizze der Forschung und Praxis. Verhaltenstherapie Und Psychosoziale Praxis 46 (4): 897–912.


Semino, E. (2008) Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Shen, Y. and Balaban, N. (1999) Metaphorical (in)co­herence in discourse. Discourse Processes 28 (2): 139–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539909545077


Sims, P. A. (2003) Working with metaphor. American Journal of Psychotherapy 57 (4): 528–536.


Stacey, M., Batstone, E., Bell, C. and Murcott, A. (1975) Power, Persistence, and Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Steen, G., Krennmayr, T., Dorst, A. G. and Herrmann, J. B. (2010) A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.14


Stott, R., Mansell, W., Salkovskis, P., Lavender, A. and Cartwright-Hatton, S. (2010) Oxford Guide to Metaphors in CBT: Building Cognitive Bridges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780199207497.001.0001


Tabachnick, B. and Fidell, L. (2007) Using Multivariate Statistics. Fifth edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.


Tay, D. (2013) Metaphor in Psychotherapy: A Descriptive and Prescriptive Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.1


Van Parys, H. and Rober, P. (2013) Micro-analysis of a therapist-generated metaphor referring to the position of a parentified child in the family. Journal of Family Therapy, 35 (1): 89–113. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6427.2011.00551.x


Witztum, E., van der Hart, O. and Friedman, B. (1988) The use of metaphors in psychotherapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 18 (4): 270–290. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00946010


Wohl, J. (1989) Integration of cultural awareness into psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy 43 (3): 343–355.