Research
Title of thesis
The Use and Comprehension of Metaphors by Trauma Victims
Description of thesis research
Psychological trauma is the emotional response that occurs as a result of extremely distressing event, for example accident, rape or natural disaster. Trauma-related mental disorders like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes clinical symptoms such as disturbing thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to the events, mental or physical distress to trauma-related cues, and alterations in how a person thinks and feels (American Psychology Association, 2013). Trauma-related mental disorders pose a serious challenge to the patients’ affective functioning and self-functioning (Davidson, 2000), the effect of which could last for years and even lifelong (Aldwin et al., 1994; Zhang et al., 2008). Although psychological trauma is usually discussed in the field of psychology and psychotherapy, verbal expressions that are unavoidably involved in mental health communication are also of interests to cognitive linguists.
A topic that is gaining recognition in the study of trauma language is trauma victims’ use of metaphors. As suffering at the mental level is not always specifiable and may not be effectively communicated through literal description alone, it is natural for trauma victims to resort to metaphors for more effective expression (Kirmayer, 1992; Radley and Chamberlain, 2001; McMullen, 1996). While the use of metaphor reflects the ways in which people think, reason and imagine (Gibbs, 2006), metaphor analysis serves as an effective tool to reveal the underlying concepts and cognitive patterns in people’s understanding and experiencing of trauma. Meanwhile, the communication of traumatic feelings creates a context where embodied experiences, sociocultural understanding and individual experiences meet, therefore, an analysis of trauma victims’ use of metaphors could also provide valuable insights into the contextual features of metaphors. On the practical side, the study of metaphorical patterns in mental health communication also holds implications for the clinical exploitation and management of metaphors in the practice of psychotherapy (Tay, 2013). Besides trauma victims’ use of metaphors, how they process and understand trauma-related metaphorical contents is also a topic worth exploring. Since bodily experiences are intimately related to people’s abstract thinking and reasoning (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Boroditsky, 2000, 2001; Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002; Wilson and Gibbs, 2007) and undergoing a traumatic event usually involves special bodily experiences, an examination of metaphor processing in the case of trauma may provide supplementary evidence of the role of bodily experiences in metaphor comprehension.
My thesis aims to investigate (1) how trauma victims make use of metaphor in their description of traumatic experiences and (2) how traumatic experiences influence trauma victims’ processing and evaluation of metaphors. Research methods to be adopted include semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis combining qualitative and quantitative methods and psycholinguistic experiments.
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