Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine: The challenge of tellability.

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 respondent's narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread.

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 or field experiments.

Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology: Investigating personification in first-person accounts of voice-hearing.

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 corpus methods to augment the findings of a qualitative approach to 40 interviews with voice-hearers, whereby each interview was coded as involving 'minimal' or 'complex' personification of voices.

Illusory social agents within and beyond voices: A computational linguistics analysis of the experience of psychosis.

Objectives: Psychosis has a strong social component and often involves the experience of being affected by 'illusory social agents'. However, this experience remains under-characterized, particularly for social agents in delusions and non-vocal hallucinations. One useful approach is a form of computational linguistics called corpus linguistics that studies texts to identify patterns of meaning encoded in both the semantics and linguistic structure of the text.

Enrollment, retention, and strategies for including disadvantaged populations in randomized controlled trials: a systematic review protocol.

Background: Many randomized controlled trials fail to reach their target sample size. When coupled with the omission and underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in randomized controlled trials, many trials fail to obtain data that accurately represents the true diversity of their target population. Policies and practices have been implemented to increase representation of disadvantaged groups in many randomized controlled trials, with some trials specifically targeting such groups.

Person-ness of voices in lived experience accounts of psychosis: combining literary linguistics and clinical psychology.

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 facilitates a much more nuanced account of the different degrees of person-ness voices might be perceived to possess. We propose a scalar Characterisation Model of Voices and demonstrate its explanatory potential by comparing two lived experience descriptions of voices in interviews with voice-hearers in a psychosis intervention.

A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices.

: "Continuum" approaches to psychosis have generated reports of similarities and differences in voice-hearing in clinical and non-clinical populations at the cohort level, but not typically examined overlap or of difference between groups. : We used a computer-aided linguistic approach to explore reports of voice-hearing by a clinical group (Early Intervention in Psychosis service-users; = 40) and a non-clinical group (spiritualists; = 27). We identify semantic categories of terms statistically overused by one group compared with the other, and by each group compared to a control sample of non-voice-hearing interview data (log likelihood (LL) value 6.

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.

The online use of Violence and Journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals: a mixed methods study.

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 753 302 words.

Setting: A UK-based online forum for patients with cancer (500 134 words) and a UK-based website for health professionals (253 168 words).

Henry's voices: the representation of auditory verbal hallucinations in an autobiographical narrative.

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, what kinds of utterances they produce and any salient stylistic features of these utterances.

Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath's experience of depression.

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the 'lived experience' of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression.