Zsófia Demjén
Biographic Data
| ID | 104513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zsófia Demjén |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zsófia |
| FAMILY NAME | Demjén |
| SIGNATURE | DEMJÉN Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3445-6861 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Narratives, Information and Manifestations of Resistance to Persuasion in Online Discussions of HPV Vaccination
There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab …
Laughter in hospital emergency departments
For patients, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are unfamiliar, institutional contexts involving high-stakes communication in heightened emotional circumstances. This study examines laughter, as one expression of emotion, in an existing 649,631-word corpus of naturally occurring clinician-patient interactions recorded in five Australian hospitals. A mixed methods approach revealed (1) the spread, frequency and producers of laughter, and (2) th…
Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine
Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a res…
Metaphors for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths
This paper discusses the metaphors used by sixteen palliative healthcare professionals from around the United Kingdom in semi-structured interviews to describe what they see as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths. The interviews, conducted for the large-scale “Metaphor in End-of-Life Care” project, are set against the background of contemporary practices and discourses around end-of-life care, dying and quality of death. To date, the use of metaphor in descr…
Am I being unreasonable to vaccinate my kids against my ex’s wishes?’ – A corpus linguistic exploration of conflict in vaccination discussions on Mumsnet Talk’s Aibu forum
Online parenting forums are popular sources of information about childhood vaccinations, but vaccination discussions, especially online, are often polarised and polarising (Jenkins & Moreno 2020). This can have very real implications for ultimate vaccination decisions (Al-Hasan et al., 2021). Among the most visited parenting forums in the UK is Mumsnet Talk, hosted on the parenting website Mumsnet, which has a reputation for being straight-talkin…
Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology
Triangulating corpus linguistic approaches with other (linguistic and non-linguistic) approaches enhances “both the rigour of corpus linguistics and its incorporation into all kinds of research” ( McEnery & Hardie, 2012 : 227). Our study investigates an important area of mental health research: the experiences of those who hear voices that others cannot hear, and particularly the ways in which those voices are described as person-like. We apply c…
Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics
Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants' understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomiz…
Person-ness of voices in lived experience accounts of psychosis
In this paper, we use concepts and insights from the literary linguistic study of story-world characters to shed new light on the nature of voices as social agents in the context of lived experience accounts of voice-hearing. We demonstrate a considerable overlap between approaches to voices as social agents in clinical psychology and the perception of characters in the linguistic study of fiction, but argue that the literary linguistic approach …
Emotional Implications of Metaphor
When faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journe…
Complexity theory and conversational humour
This paper argues that a fuller understanding of conversational humour, in all its multifunctional, multifaceted, and heterogeneous nature, could be achieved by conducting at least some conversational humour research from the perspective of complexity theory (an umbrella term covering 'complex adaptive systems theory', 'dynamic systems theory', 'chaos theory', etc.). Complexity theory encourages questions that are not usually asked about conversa…
The online use of Violence and Journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals
OBJECTIVE: To compare the frequencies with which patients with cancer and health professionals use Violence and Journey metaphors when writing online; and to investigate the use of these metaphors by patients with cancer, in view of critiques of war-related metaphors for cancer and the adoption of the notion of the 'cancer journey' in UK policy documents. DESIGN: Computer-assisted quantitative and qualitative study of two data sets totalling 753 …
The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language
In the summer of 2000, an international group of ten metaphor scholars came together in Amsterdam for a three-day expert meeting sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in order to discuss whether it was even possible to develop a reliable method for metaphor identification in language. At that time many linguists were not interested in the methods and techniques needed for metaphor identification, while others dou…
Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language
An Integrated Approach to Metaphor and Framing in Cognition, Discourse, and Practice, with an Application to Metaphors for Cancer
In this article, we examine the notion of 'framing' as a function of metaphor from three interrelated perspectives-cognitive, discourse-based, and practice-based-with the aim of providing an adaptable blueprint of good practice in framing analysis. We bring together cognitive and discourse-based approaches in an integrated multi-level framework, and demonstrate its value to both theory and practice by applying it to a corpus-based study of violen…
Laughing at cancer
In the context of cancer, humour and joking can still be seen as socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer can find relief in making light of their often life-threatening situations. How and why they do this has received little systematic attention to date. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring 530,055 words of online patient-patient interactions on a thread explicitly dedicated to humour within a UK-based cancer forum. A corpus …
A computer-assisted study of the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life by patients, family carers and health professionals
This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have…
Henry's voices
The book Henry's Demons (2011) recounts the events surrounding Henry Cockburn's diagnosis of schizophrenia from the alternating perspectives of Henry himself and his father Patrick. In this paper, we present a detailed linguistic analysis of Henry's first-person accounts of experiences that could be described as auditory verbal hallucinations. We first provide a typology of Henry's voices, taking into account who or what is presented as speaking,…
Good’ and ‘bad’ deaths
This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal …
Motion and conflicted self metaphors in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Smith Journal’
This paper considers how mental states can be conveyed by metaphorical expressions in texts of a personal nature. Figurative language is understood to play an important role in the expression of such complex nuanced phenomena (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Kövecses, 2000; Gibbs, Leggit & Turner, 2002). This study focuses on two main groups of metaphors, linked to mental states, in the Smith Journal of “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”. ‘Mental …
An Integrated Approach to Metaphor and Framing in Cognition, Discourse, and Practice, with an Application to Metaphors for Cancer
In this article, we examine the notion of 'framing' as a function of metaphor from three interrelated perspectives-cognitive, discourse-based, and practice-based-with the aim of providing an adaptable blueprint of good practice in framing analysis. We bring together cognitive and discourse-based approaches in an integrated multi-level framework, and demonstrate its value to both theory and practice by applying it to a corpus-based study of violen…
Laughing at cancer
In the context of cancer, humour and joking can still be seen as socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer can find relief in making light of their often life-threatening situations. How and why they do this has received little systematic attention to date. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring 530,055 words of online patient-patient interactions on a thread explicitly dedicated to humour within a UK-based cancer forum. A corpus …
A computer-assisted study of the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life by patients, family carers and health professionals
This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have…
Complexity theory and conversational humour
This paper argues that a fuller understanding of conversational humour, in all its multifunctional, multifaceted, and heterogeneous nature, could be achieved by conducting at least some conversational humour research from the perspective of complexity theory (an umbrella term covering 'complex adaptive systems theory', 'dynamic systems theory', 'chaos theory', etc.). Complexity theory encourages questions that are not usually asked about conversa…
Laughter in hospital emergency departments
For patients, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are unfamiliar, institutional contexts involving high-stakes communication in heightened emotional circumstances. This study examines laughter, as one expression of emotion, in an existing 649,631-word corpus of naturally occurring clinician-patient interactions recorded in five Australian hospitals. A mixed methods approach revealed (1) the spread, frequency and producers of laughter, and (2) th…
Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology
Triangulating corpus linguistic approaches with other (linguistic and non-linguistic) approaches enhances “both the rigour of corpus linguistics and its incorporation into all kinds of research” ( McEnery & Hardie, 2012 : 227). Our study investigates an important area of mental health research: the experiences of those who hear voices that others cannot hear, and particularly the ways in which those voices are described as person-like. We apply c…
Am I being unreasonable to vaccinate my kids against my ex’s wishes?’ – A corpus linguistic exploration of conflict in vaccination discussions on Mumsnet Talk’s Aibu forum
Online parenting forums are popular sources of information about childhood vaccinations, but vaccination discussions, especially online, are often polarised and polarising (Jenkins & Moreno 2020). This can have very real implications for ultimate vaccination decisions (Al-Hasan et al., 2021). Among the most visited parenting forums in the UK is Mumsnet Talk, hosted on the parenting website Mumsnet, which has a reputation for being straight-talkin…
Henry's voices
The book Henry's Demons (2011) recounts the events surrounding Henry Cockburn's diagnosis of schizophrenia from the alternating perspectives of Henry himself and his father Patrick. In this paper, we present a detailed linguistic analysis of Henry's first-person accounts of experiences that could be described as auditory verbal hallucinations. We first provide a typology of Henry's voices, taking into account who or what is presented as speaking,…
Motion and conflicted self metaphors in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Smith Journal’
This paper considers how mental states can be conveyed by metaphorical expressions in texts of a personal nature. Figurative language is understood to play an important role in the expression of such complex nuanced phenomena (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Kövecses, 2000; Gibbs, Leggit & Turner, 2002). This study focuses on two main groups of metaphors, linked to mental states, in the Smith Journal of “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”. ‘Mental …
Henry's voices
The book Henry's Demons (2011) recounts the events surrounding Henry Cockburn's diagnosis of schizophrenia from the alternating perspectives of Henry himself and his father Patrick. In this paper, we present a detailed linguistic analysis of Henry's first-person accounts of experiences that could be described as auditory verbal hallucinations. We first provide a typology of Henry's voices, taking into account who or what is presented as speaking,…
Good’ and ‘bad’ deaths
This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal …
A computer-assisted study of the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life by patients, family carers and health professionals
This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have…
The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language
In the summer of 2000, an international group of ten metaphor scholars came together in Amsterdam for a three-day expert meeting sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in order to discuss whether it was even possible to develop a reliable method for metaphor identification in language. At that time many linguists were not interested in the methods and techniques needed for metaphor identification, while others dou…
Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language
An Integrated Approach to Metaphor and Framing in Cognition, Discourse, and Practice, with an Application to Metaphors for Cancer
In this article, we examine the notion of 'framing' as a function of metaphor from three interrelated perspectives-cognitive, discourse-based, and practice-based-with the aim of providing an adaptable blueprint of good practice in framing analysis. We bring together cognitive and discourse-based approaches in an integrated multi-level framework, and demonstrate its value to both theory and practice by applying it to a corpus-based study of violen…
Laughing at cancer
In the context of cancer, humour and joking can still be seen as socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer can find relief in making light of their often life-threatening situations. How and why they do this has received little systematic attention to date. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring 530,055 words of online patient-patient interactions on a thread explicitly dedicated to humour within a UK-based cancer forum. A corpus …
The online use of Violence and Journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals
OBJECTIVE: To compare the frequencies with which patients with cancer and health professionals use Violence and Journey metaphors when writing online; and to investigate the use of these metaphors by patients with cancer, in view of critiques of war-related metaphors for cancer and the adoption of the notion of the 'cancer journey' in UK policy documents. DESIGN: Computer-assisted quantitative and qualitative study of two data sets totalling 753 …
Emotional Implications of Metaphor
When faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journe…
Complexity theory and conversational humour
This paper argues that a fuller understanding of conversational humour, in all its multifunctional, multifaceted, and heterogeneous nature, could be achieved by conducting at least some conversational humour research from the perspective of complexity theory (an umbrella term covering 'complex adaptive systems theory', 'dynamic systems theory', 'chaos theory', etc.). Complexity theory encourages questions that are not usually asked about conversa…
Person-ness of voices in lived experience accounts of psychosis
In this paper, we use concepts and insights from the literary linguistic study of story-world characters to shed new light on the nature of voices as social agents in the context of lived experience accounts of voice-hearing. We demonstrate a considerable overlap between approaches to voices as social agents in clinical psychology and the perception of characters in the linguistic study of fiction, but argue that the literary linguistic approach …
Metaphors for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths
This paper discusses the metaphors used by sixteen palliative healthcare professionals from around the United Kingdom in semi-structured interviews to describe what they see as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths. The interviews, conducted for the large-scale “Metaphor in End-of-Life Care” project, are set against the background of contemporary practices and discourses around end-of-life care, dying and quality of death. To date, the use of metaphor in descr…
Am I being unreasonable to vaccinate my kids against my ex’s wishes?’ – A corpus linguistic exploration of conflict in vaccination discussions on Mumsnet Talk’s Aibu forum
Online parenting forums are popular sources of information about childhood vaccinations, but vaccination discussions, especially online, are often polarised and polarising (Jenkins & Moreno 2020). This can have very real implications for ultimate vaccination decisions (Al-Hasan et al., 2021). Among the most visited parenting forums in the UK is Mumsnet Talk, hosted on the parenting website Mumsnet, which has a reputation for being straight-talkin…
Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology
Triangulating corpus linguistic approaches with other (linguistic and non-linguistic) approaches enhances “both the rigour of corpus linguistics and its incorporation into all kinds of research” ( McEnery & Hardie, 2012 : 227). Our study investigates an important area of mental health research: the experiences of those who hear voices that others cannot hear, and particularly the ways in which those voices are described as person-like. We apply c…
Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics
Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants' understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomiz…
Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine
Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a res…
Narratives, Information and Manifestations of Resistance to Persuasion in Online Discussions of HPV Vaccination
There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab …
Laughter in hospital emergency departments
For patients, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are unfamiliar, institutional contexts involving high-stakes communication in heightened emotional circumstances. This study examines laughter, as one expression of emotion, in an existing 649,631-word corpus of naturally occurring clinician-patient interactions recorded in five Australian hospitals. A mixed methods approach revealed (1) the spread, frequency and producers of laughter, and (2) th…
Psychology (17 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Humor Studies and Applications (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (6 works) · Metaphor (6 works)