Navigating intercultural misunderstandings: An examination of emotion brokering.

OBJECTIVES: Communication difficulties are inevitable when individuals interact with members of a different culture. The experience of such communication barriers may be particularly salient for those from immigrant families who need to navigate multiple cultures. Youth from immigrant families are known to serve as cultural brokers to help their families navigate communication with those in the host culture. Most brokering research has examined language brokering (i.e., interpreting language for others). An unstudied brokering process and the focus of the present research is emotion brokering: the interpretation of emotion norms for others. In this investigation, we examined the occurrence of emotion brokering for close family members in a sample of Latinx college students. METHOD: We conducted an exploratory survey to identify situations where participants perceived intercultural emotion-based misunderstandings and reported emotion brokering (Study 1). We then employed a more focused survey to further understand the contexts in which individuals brokered emotions (Study 2). RESULTS: Results revealed that many participants encountered intercultural emotion-based misunderstandings and experienced brokering emotions (Studies 1 and 2). Furthermore, the findings illustrated the typical contexts and emotions involved in the emotion brokering experience. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide insight into a distinct form of cultural brokering. In addition, findings illustrate how cultural variation in emotion impacts daily social interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Praying to win this battle: Cancer Metaphors in Latina and Spanish Women's Narratives.

This study closely examines 51 breast cancer narratives Latina and Spanish women wrote for other patients to illuminate how they conceptualize their health, with insights for addressing health disparities. Using discourse analysis of the role of language and culture in health care communication, this study focuses on the use of metaphors in the narratives. This provides revelations about the cultural and linguistic aspects of how the writers conceptualize their disease. Building on past research on metaphor use in cancer discourse in the English language, this study reveals the prevalence of metaphors comparing cancer to combat, or more generally, violence (e.g., "my battle against cancer"), or a journey (e.g., "my path with cancer"). Writers used this metaphorical language to offer advice to others with cancer and to mark their membership in a larger community of people with cancer. We also find that Spanish women use metaphors more frequently than Latinas and that they differed in their metaphorical portrayals of cancer. This research uncovers culturally embedded themes that are central to how women with cancer think about the disease, such as the prominence of spirituality in Latinas' metaphorical constructions, a pattern not evident in Spanish women's narratives.

An analysis of metaphor in COVID-19 TV news in English and Spanish.

BACKGROUND: Latinxs lack equitable access to science-based, accessible, trustworthy, and bilingual health information and rely heavily on TV news as a source of health information. This study examines how TV news media convey COVID-19 health- and safety-related information to the public, focusing on communications that target Latinxs in the US, a group disproportionately affected by COVID-19. METHOD: To understand how information targets Latinxs, we analyzed conceptual metaphors used in Spanish and English descriptions of the COVID-19 pandemic using TV news archive. Metaphor is an integral part of daily communication that can help people explain what is abstract in terms of what is concrete. Our analysis focused on prominent COVID-19 metaphors in both languages: war, journey, and natural disaster. RESULTS: Similar to previous studies, we found that war metaphors were pervasive in English, for instance, as in 'Diagnostic testing is the only weapon that allows you to fight COVID-19' and 'a 15-day battle with COVID-19.' A new finding was that war metaphors were even more common in Spanish than in English. The journey metaphor had similar rates of use in both languages, while the natural disaster metaphors were more common in English than in Spanish. CONCLUSIONS: Our work provides novel insights into how TV news reports use metaphor to convey information about COVID-19 to viewers in English and Spanish. We also offer implications on using culturally informed language and conclude with directions for future research to guide health communications serving linguistic minority communities such as Latinxs.

Medical Spanish Standardization in U.S. Medical Schools: Consensus Statement From a Multidisciplinary Expert Panel.

Medical Spanish (MS) education is in growing demand from U.S. medical students, providers, and health systems, but there are no standard recommendations for how to structure the curricula, evaluate programs, or assess provider performance or linguistic competence. This gap in medical education and assessment jeopardizes health care communication with Hispanic/Latino patients and poses significant quality and safety risks. The National Hispanic Health Foundation and University of Illinois College of Medicine convened a multidisciplinary expert panel in March 2018 to define national standards for the teaching and application of MS skills in patient-physician communication, establish curricular and competency guidelines for MS courses in medical schools, propose best practices for MS skill assessment and certification, and identify next steps needed for the implementation of the proposed national standards. Experts agreed on the following consensus recommendations: (1) create a Medical Spanish Taskforce to, among other things, define educational standards; (2) integrate MS educational initiatives with government-funded research and training efforts as a strategy to improve Hispanic/Latino health; (3) standardize core MS learner competencies; (4) propose a consensus core curricular structure for MS courses in medical schools; (5) assess MS learner skills through standardized patient encounters and develop a national certification exam; and (6) develop standardized evaluation and data collection processes for MS programs. MS education and assessment should be standardized and evaluated with a robust interinstitutional medical education research strategy that includes collaboration with multidisciplinary stakeholders to ensure linguistically appropriate care for the growing Spanish-speaking U.S. population.

Cultural competence and metaphor in mental healthcare interactions: A linguistic perspective.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to understand how Spanish-speaking patients conceptualize mental health issues. This study uses a linguistic perspective to focus on how 23 Mexican-origin patients and their doctor talk about mental health during psychiatric interviews conducted in Spanish and how they negotiate cultural barriers. METHODS: This work analyzes when the doctor and his patients reference metaphors (e.g. feeling "empty," feeling "low"). Metaphors are pervasive in all cultures and languages and reveal important information about people's attitudes and feelings about a range of conditions and circumstances. RESULTS: This work demonstrates the role of metaphor and linguistic analysis in uncovering culturally based constructions of mental health. The results reveal that the doctor and patients reference different sets of metaphors, which, at times, causes miscommunication. CONCLUSIONS: Practitioner awareness of how patients use metaphorical expressions in health is crucial for promoting advanced cultural and linguistic competence and ultimately, patient-centered care. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: The main findings have implications for health communication with minority groups such as Spanish-speaking Latinos/as in the United States. Practitioners working with Spanish-speaking patients should be familiar with how Latinos/as conceptualize health and how to avoid or repair confusion caused by cultural barriers.

Modality resources in Spanish during psychiatric interviews with Mexican patients.

This study examines modality in doctor-patient interactions during psychiatric interviews. Twenty three interviews were conducted in Spanish and were video-recorded. The patients are members of a small community in rural California. Using the interpersonal metafunction (Eggins 2004; Halliday 1994) and approaches in pragmatics literature this work reveals the lexicogrammatical choices the patients and the doctor make using both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Spanish modalization can be realized through modal operators (e.g. might), mood adjuncts (e.g. possibly), and the conditional and future tenses. In addition to these, oral contexts have alternative forms of expressing modalization such as using the preposition como 'like' and tag questions (e.g. right?) as the pragmatics literature has described. This work makes a methodological contribution by highlighting the analytical tools that alternative approaches to discourse analysis (pragmatics in this case) make available and how they complement the interpersonal metafunction. The results of this study reveal that patients use modalization at particular moments in the interview, for instance when discussing their symptoms and conditions to deliver their information carefully and to recognize the social status of the doctor. The doctor also strategically uses modalization when he asks sensitive questions in order to displace responsibility from the patients and avoid a face-threatening situation.