How we think about depression: The role of linguistic framing

Florencia Reali, Tania Soriano, Daniela Rodríguez

Producción científica: Contribución a una revistaArtículorevisión exhaustiva

24 Citas (Scopus)

Resumen

Descriptions of emotional disorders vary according to cultural and historical context. Framing mental illness as a disease - as opposed to being a consequence of psychosocial factors - has been proposed as a strategy to fight stigma in recent years. Here we combine two studies, a corpus analysis and an experimental survey, to explore this issue in the case of Spanish. First, we conducted a corpus analysis to investigate the patterns of linguistic framing of depression - including disease-like descriptions and metaphorical frames - using data from Latin American countries. Two main patterns were identified: (1) depression is frequently framed as a brain disease. In line with medicalization trends observed worldwide, this pattern has increased over time. (2) The data showed that depression is also metaphorically construed as a place in space or as an opponent. Second, we investigated whether the instantiation of subtle linguistic cues influences people's perception of a description of a hypothetical case of depression. A survey experiment conducted among Colombian students revealed that when depression was framed as a disease, the participants' perception of the depressed person's responsibility was reduced. Moreover, disease-like descriptions and metaphorical frames influenced participants' initial interpretations of the role of social causal factors.

Idioma originalInglés
Páginas (desde-hasta)127-136
Número de páginas10
PublicaciónRevista Latinoamericana de Psicologia
Volumen48
N.º2
DOI
EstadoPublicada - 2016
Publicado de forma externa

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