A multi-perspectival study of attitudes and responses towards metaphor use in the university counseling context

Abstract

Many mental health professionals believe that metaphors can support the goal of understanding and modifying clients’ feelings and attitudes, which are often difficult to express with literal language (Stott, Mansell, Salkovskis, Lavender, & Cartwright-Hatton, 2010). For example, an utterance like ‘I am a feather in a rapid stream’ allows client and counselor to concretely discuss emotional experiences in terms of the physical quality of being pushed around. There is extensive discussion of the general value of metaphors for short-term counseling as well as psychotherapy for chronic mental illnesses. However, the fundamental question of how clients actually regard and respond to metaphors has received little attention. This is surprising given that counseling is widely recognized as a collaborative activity, and client attitudes towards counseling strategies can influence outcomes even when these strategies objectively work (Greenberg, Constantino, & Bruce, 2006).

This project is a multi-perspectival study of attitudes and responses towards metaphor use in counseling, with a focus on the important context of university students and academic issues. It has three independent and methodologically diverse components. The first component employs questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to investigate conscious beliefs about whether metaphors perform the functions claimed in the counseling literature. The second component compares skin conductance levels and responses to metaphorical versus non-metaphorical stimuli to study the relationship between metaphor processing and unconscious emotional arousal. The third component uses discourse analysis to describe response pattems to metaphor use in spontaneous counseling talk, where response types ranging from collaborative co-construction to uptake failure will be analyzed for associations with other interactional variables. Participants are students who utilize services provided by the Mental Health Education and Counseling Centre (MHECC) of National Huaqiao University, where both co-investigators are senior counselors.

The findings will give counselors a deeper understanding of how clients respond to metaphor as a strategy, and also address theoretical issues of interest to linguists, psychologists, and metaphor researchers in general. While each component of the project is independently valuable and employs a distinct methodology, the seldom seen pluralism promoted by their combination promises to exert positive influence on the multidisciplinary field of metaphor research.