Psycholinguistic Predictors of Health

Abstract

The article deals with the actual issues of psycholinguistics, which are related to the preservation and restoration of human health. The main research directions research of psychology of health are determined and the theoretical preconditions of psycholinguistic aspects of health are analyzed. Researches in cognitive-behavioral and positive psychotherapy makes it possible to determine that the spoken words directly affect the state of person’s health. The lack of detailed empirical studies motivated us to this study, which was intended to determine the qualitative differences in the speech production of healthy and sick people. The hypothesis of the empirical study was that there are common sense traits of the narrative that unite people with a medical diagnosis. The hypothesis verification was carried out with the help of psycholinguistic techniques, in particular, the autonarrative "My Life" and the method "Psychological Autobiography". The sample was composed from oncologic patients and healthy people, students of univercities. After analysis and interpretation of the results of the study, it was found that differences in speech experience and the implementation of speech activity of healthy and sick people are in the qualitative characteristics of the subjective evaluation of the components of the internal picture of life, manifested through the analysis of the syntagmatic composition of the narrative. Common narratives that combine the speech activity of sick people are: 1) increase the proportion of words with negative emotional coloring on the assessment of their own lives; 2) increase the proportion of "affective" words on the designation of the somatic and personal components of the internal picture of life; 3) the presence of syntagmas describing autoaggression and retroflection. The study shows the correlations between the peculiarities of speech experience and the state of health of respondents. So, in this perspective psycholinguistics of health determine the laws of the influence of personality’s speech on the state of his mental, social and physical health as the main subject of its studies.

Keywords

• psycholinguistics, health, narrative, internal picture of life, syntagmatic structure, autoaggression