Moving books and sensitive readers
Affective stances about fiction, film and poetry in medical education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/cam.20400Keywords:
discursive psychology, interaction about fiction, film and poetry, affective stance, emotion, subject-object relations, medical educationAbstract
Fiction is understood to have unique qualities that emotionally engage the reader, making it suitable as a didactic tool in medical education to help students prepare for the emotional aspects of their future profession. To date, however, little is known about the processes through which talking about fiction, film or poetry can help medical students to co-construct emotional reactions as affective stances and how that might contribute to their professional development.
Using a discursive psychology approach, video recordings from 36 fiction seminars collected from 2016 to 2018 were analysed regarding how affective stances related to reading were constructed by medical students. The findings illustrate how students use subject–object relations to account for affective stances, meaning that they attribute their emotional reaction either to an aspect of the book (object-side explanations), or to personal characteristics (subject-side explanations). The way students enact and account for their affective stances can provide opportunities for tutors to create teachable moments for the students. This study contributes to discursive psychology and reader-response research, as well as medical education research.
References
Allington, Daniel (2012) Private experience, textual analysis, and institutional authority: The discursive practice of critical interpretation and its enactment in literary training. Language and Literature 21 (2): 211–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947011435864
Allington, Daniel and Joann Swann (2009) Researching literary reading as social practice. Language and Literature 18 (3): 219–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947009105850
Blasco, Pablo and Graziela Moreto (2012) Teaching empathy through movies: Reaching learners’ affective domain in medical education. Journal of Education and Learning 1 (1): 22–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/jel.v1n1p22
Cekaite, Asta and Ann-Carita Evaldsson (2020) The moral character of emotion work in adult-child interactions. Text & Talk 40 (5): 563–572. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-2082.
Charon, Rita and Peter Wyer (2008) Narrative evidence based medicine. The Lancet 371 (9609): 296–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(08)60156-7
Chopra, Arun (2018) When art and medicine collide: Using literature to teach psychiatry. In Victoria Tischler (ed.) Mental Health, Psychiatry and the Arts – A Teaching Handbook, 65–76. London: CRC Press.
Du Bois, John W. and Elise Kärkkäinen (2012) Taking a stance on emotion: Affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction. Text and Talk 32 (4): 433–451. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2012-0021
Edwards, Derek (1997) Discourse and Cognition. London: Sage.
Edwards, Derek (1999) Emotion discourse. Culture & Psychology 5 (3): 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X9953001
Edwards, Derek (2007) Managing subjectivity in talk. In Alexa Hepburn and Sally Wiggins (eds) Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction, 31–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, Derek and Jonathan Potter (1992) Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.
Edwards, Derek and Jonathan Potter (2005) Discursive psychology, mental states and descriptions. In Hedvig te Molder and Jonathan Potter (eds) Conversation and Cognition, 241–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, Derek and Jonathan Potter (2017) Some uses of subject-side assessments. Discourse Studies 19 (5): 497–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617715171
Ekner, Reidar (1985) Efter flera tusen rad: Om livet, om döden [After several thousand rad: About life, about death]. Stockholm: Författarförlaget.
Eriksson, Katarina (2002) Booktalk dilemmas: Teachers’ organisation of pupils’ reading. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 46 (4): 391–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031383022000024570
Eriksson Barajas, Katarina (2008) Beyond stereotypes? Talking about gender in school booktalk. Ethnography and Education 3 (2): 129–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457820802062367
Eriksson Barajas, Katarina and Karin Aronsson (2009) Avid versus struggling readers: Co-construed pupil identities in school booktalk. Language and Literature 18 (3): 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947009105854.
Evans, H. Martyn and Jane Macnaughton (2004) Should medical humanities be a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary study? Medical Humanities 30 (1): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jmh.2004.000143
Fernandez-Quintanilla, Carolina (2020) Textual and reader factors in narrative empathy: An empirical reader response study using focus groups. Language and Literature 29 (2): 124–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020927134
Gidlund, Kristian (2013) I kroppen min: Resan mot livets slut och alltings början [In my body: The journey towards the end of life and the beginning of everything]. Stockholm: Forum.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, Asta Cekaite and Charles Goodwin (2012) Emotion as stance. In Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds) Emotion in Interaction, 16–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graham, Jeremy, Lauren M. Benson, Judy Swanson, Darryl Potyk, Kenn Daratha and Ken Roberts (2016) Medical humanities coursework is associated with greater measured empathy in medical students. American Journal of Medicine 129 (12): 1334–1337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2016.08.005
Haakana, Markku (2001) Laughter as a patient’s resource: Dealing with delicate aspects of medical interaction. Text & Talk 21 (1–2): 187–219. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.21.1-2.187
Hepburn, Alexa and Galina Bolden (2013) The conversation analytic approach to transcription. In Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, 57–76. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hepburn, Alexa and Jonathan Potter (2007) Crying receipts: Time, empathy, and institutional practice. Research on Language and Social Interaction 40 (1): 89–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701331299
Holt, Elizabeth (2011) On the nature of ‘laughables’: Laughter as a response to overdone figurative phrases. Pragmatics 21 (3): 393–410. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21.3.05hol
Jefferson, Gail (1984) On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles. In Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 346–369. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, Gail (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Gene L. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies From the First Generation, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Keen, Suzanne (2011) Introduction: Narrative and the emotions. Poetics Today 32 (1): 1–53. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-1188176
Kidd, David and Emanuele Castano (2013) Reading literary fiction improves Theory of Mind. Science 342 (6156): 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918
Kidd, David and Emanuele Castano (2019) Reading literary fiction and Theory of Mind: Three preregistered replications and extensions of Kidd and Castano (2013). Social Psychological and Personality Science 10 (4): 522–531. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618775410
Koopman, Emy M. (2015) Empathic reactions after reading: The role of genre, personal factors and affective responses. Poetics 50: 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.02.008
Montgomery Hunter, Kathryn, Rita Charon and Jack L. Coulehan (1995) The study of literature in medical education. Academic Medicine 70 (9): 787–794.
Murakami, Haruki (2014) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. London: Harvil Secker.
Peräkylä, Anssi and Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds) (2012) Emotion in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Petersson, Margareta and Annette Årheim (2010) Att läsa människor. Om litteraturläsning i läkarutbildningen. [To read people. About fiction reading in medical education]. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 40 (3): 27–37.
Phelan, James (1989) Narrative discourse, literary character, and ideology. In James Phelan (ed.) Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, 132–146. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Pomerantz, Anita (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Potter, Jonathan and Alexa Hepburn (2010) Putting aspiration into words: ‘Laugh particles’, managing descriptive trouble and modulating action. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (6): 1543–1555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.10.003
Remein, Christy D., Ellen Childs, John C. Pasco, Ludovic Trinquart, David B. Flynn, Sarah L. Wingerter, Robina M. Bhasin et al. (2020) Content and outcomes of narrative medicine programmes: A systematic review of the literature through 2019. BMJ Open 10 : Article e031568. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-031568
Rydén Gramner, Anja and Sally Wiggins (2020) Enacting emotion: Embodied affective stance in a medical education fiction seminar. In
Sally Wiggins and Karin Osvaldsson Cromdal (eds) Discursive Psychology and Embodiment: Beyond Subject-Object Binaries, 221–246. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shapiro, Johanna, Alexandra Duke, John Boker and C. Sue Ahearn (2005) Just a spoonful of humanities makes the medicine go down: Introducing literature into a family medicine clerkship. Medical Education 39 (6): 605–612. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02178.x
Shapiro, Johanna, Lois L. Nixon, Stephen E. Wear and David J. Doukas (2015) Medical professionalism: What the study of literature can contribute to the conversation. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 10: Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-015-0030-0
Smith, Allen C. III and Sherryl Kleinman (1989) Managing emotions in medical school: Students’ contacts with the living and the dead. Social Psychology Quarterly 52 (1): 56–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786904
Swann, Joann and Daniel Allington (2009) Reading groups and the language of literary texts: A case study in social reading. Language and Literature 18 (3): 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947009105852
Whiteley, Sara and David Peplow (2021) Interpreting real and fictional worlds in interaction: A socio-cognitive approach to reading group talk. Text & Talk 41 (1): 119–139. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-2072
Wiggins, Sally (2017) Discursive Psychology: Theory, Method and Applications. London: Sage.
Wiggins, Sally and Jonathan Potter (2003) Attitudes and evaluative practices: Category vs. item and subjective vs. objective constructions in everyday food assessments. British Journal of Social Psychology 42 (4): 513–531. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466603322595257
Wilkinson, Sue and Celia Kitzinger (2006) Surprise as an interactional achievement: Reaction tokens in conversation. Social Psychology Quarterly 69 (2): 150–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250606900203
Published
Issue
Section
License
copyright Equinox Publishing Ltd.
