The effects of psychopathology and shame on social representations of health and lifestyle behaviours via free association: a graph analysis approach

Background There is a knowledge gap in whether psychopathology aspects can shape and mark the social representations about health and lifestyle. In this work, we investigated the association of psychopathology and shame with the centrality of the words describing eight common social representations of health and lifestyle. Methods A convenience sample of 288 adults participated with an average age of 44.7, and 62.6% were women. The participants were asked to express three consecutive words associated with eight different health and lifestyle experiences by utilizing the free association method. The participants also were completed the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R), the Experiences of Shame Scale (ESS), and the Other as Shamer Scale (OAS). Canonical correlation analysis was applied to investigate the relationship between the set of the eight-word centralities and the psycho-demographic variables consisting of the subject's age and gender, the SCL 90 subscales, the OAS, and the ESS. Based on these findings, a structural equation explorative model was formed to test the unidimensionality of the five centralities construct. Results Τhe psychological characteristics of interpersonal sensitivity, depression, external shame, and hostility were found to affect the word selection process on the social representations concerning nightlife, health, diet, lifestyle, and alcohol consumption. Participants with increased levels of depression tend to choose more centrally positioned words when the stimulus word was diet and more decentralized responses when the stimulus word was health. At the same time, higher external shame corresponded to more decentralized words for the categories of health and lifestyle. Conclusions Our results indicate that there is a potential interaction between the psychological state and how a social representation of health and lifestyle is constructed through selected words. Graph theory emerged as an additional tool to use to study these relations.

Conceptualization of the Kazakh language in the Linguistic Consciousness of the Kazakhs

The purpose of this study is to describe ways of conceptualizing the Kazakh language from the perspectives of the representatives of the Kazakh nation. Language is a very important phenomenon for the people, which reflects their national characteristics. Of great interest is the conceptualization of the Kazakh language by representatives of the Kazakh linguoculture in the context of the situation when public opinion recognizes its position in general and its status as unsatisfactory rather than satisfactory. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is to conduct a free-associative experiment among native speakers of the Kazakh language on the stimulus-word “қазақ тілі”. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the obtained associative data were distributed according to the frequency criterion with subsequent modeling of the associative field and its cognitive structure. A free associative experiment was carried out among the native speakers of the Kazakh language. The results of the study demonstrate that the Kazakh language reflects the origins of the nation, its history and customs. The native language for the Kazakh ethnic group is associated with Motherland, pride and patriotism. Analysis of proverbs, sayings and literary contexts have shown that the Kazakh language is very rich and actualizes the beginning of upbringing and morality.

The image of mother in multi-structural languages (based on the material of the Russian and Tuvan languages)

This article analyzes the image of mother in the Russian and Tuvan languages based on the results of associative experiment. The key goal of this cross-cultural research is consists in comparison and determination of the constant meanings underlying this image and its ethnocultural peculiarities in the linguistic consciousness of native speakers of multi-structural languages. The object of this research is the verbal associations for the stimulus word “mother” in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian and Tuvan people. The empirical material is acquired in the course of experimental methods and viewed from the perspective of the fragments of linguistic consciousness, which reflect the image of the world of a particular culture. The practical value of the work is defined by the relevant contrastive study of the lexicon from the category of universal images, as well as by possibility of application of the obtained results in translation studies, cross-cultural communication, linguoculturology, and lexicography. The scientific novelty lies in carrying out a psycholinguistic interpretation of the associative fields "mother" and “ie”, examination of their field stratification, comparison of fragments of the core of linguistic consciousness of the Russian and Tuvan people. The selected image id describe through the prism of its archetypal nature. The conducted analysis reveals that the perception of a particular stimulus word in linguistic consciousness of a person is impacted not only by ethnic and sociocultural factors, but by the corresponding language norms as well.

The Problem of Describing the Gender Specificity of Word Semantics

The article discusses the theoretical problems of describing the semantics of a word, considers the possibility of using the data of a psycholinguistic experiment in describing the word meaning. The article considers gender characteristics of the specifics of the word semantics. The stimulus word meanings are interpreted according to the results of a psycholinguistic experiment as a result of semantic interpretation. It is through the analysis of the semantics of the word child that a model for describing the psycholinguistic meaning of the word is presented. An example of an entry in a psycholinguistic gender explanatory dictionary is presented, it is based on the results of a free associative experiment. Before the dictionary entry analysis, there are gender associative fields obtained from the results of the experiment. Male and female psycholinguistic meanings with generalized reaction semes are indicated. The dictionary entry of the gender dictionary is presented in the form of a comparative table with two columns - the psycholinguistic formulation of the female meaning and the psycholinguistic formulation of the male meaning. The results obtained indicate the presence of gender features of the specificity of the word semantics in the linguistic consciousness of men and women, the need to create a new type of vocabulary.

The Image of a Doctor in the Linguistic Consciousness of Native Speakers оf Russian and Chinese

The study of the content of the ordinary linguistic consciousness of a native speaker / culture bearer involves considering the meaning of a word as a socio-cultural phenomenon as knowledge whose content is determined by the characteristics of culture in its current state. The most interesting data can be obtained by cross-cultural comparison based on experimental material. The article examines the knowledge associated with the word-stimulus DOCTOR in the linguistic consciousness of native speakers of Chinese and Russian. The comparison is carried out on the basis of the materials of free associative experiment with 823 native Chinese speakers, students from more than 160 universities in China. Russian material for comparison is taken from the Russian Regional Associative Dictionary [Ufimceva, Cherkasova 2018]. The method of semantic gestalt by Yu. N. Karaulov is used as a tool to analyze the associative field. The obtained data have undergone statistical analysis, the content and structure of the associative gestalt stimulus word DOCTOR have been described, as well as ethnocultural features of the ideas about the profession of doctor among the Chinese and Russians have been revealed.

Linguoculturological potential of the lexeme Rozhdestvo (‘Christmas’) in the contemporary youth’s linguistic consciousness (based on findings of an associative verbal experiment)

The paper focuses on associative verbal potential of the lexeme Rozhdestvo (‘Christmas’) in contemporary Russian youth’s linguistic worldview. The research is based on findings of an associative linguistic experiment. The experiment allowed explicating culture codes unconsciously reproduced by respondents, and produced easily calculable results. Each of the respondents had to write down five linguistic units associated with the stimulus word Rozhdestvo (‘Christmas’). Linguoculturological approach is used to interpret the obtained data as it allows analysing how cultural phenomena are represented in linguistic consciousness. The authors discover certain mobility of the linguistic means that verbalise Christmas semantics, as well as certain heterogeneity of people’s conceptions of the feast. The study reveals contemporary cultural context and discourses significant for the youth environment. The experiment’s primary result can be considered our visualisation of the cultural syncretism reflected in the perception of the lexeme Rozhdestvo. The findings can help when developing projects in education, communications, advertising that exploit cultural images and/or elements of cultural context, and serve as basis for further studies.

A New Tool for Equating Lexical Stimuli Across Experimental Conditions

Extensive work in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics has demonstrated that lexical characteristics are capable of driving large effects, however when word lists serve a utility function and are intended to be unrelated to the effect of interest such as in most working memory or long-term memory paradigms, it is critical to control for these potentially confounding lexical effects. As an alternative to randomly assigning word bank items to stimulus lists, we present LIBRA, a MATLAB-based toolbox for quickly generating stimulus word lists of user-determined length and number, which can be closely equated on an arbitrary number of lexical properties. The toolbox comprises two scripts; one is the main genetic algorithm that performs the inter-list balancing, and the other provides functionality for filtering/trimming long omnibus word lists based on several simple criteria, prior to balancing. We demonstrate that relying on purely randomized procedures often results in substantially unbalanced experimental conditions. In contrast, our method guarantees that the lists used for each experimental condition contain no meaningful differences, and thus that the lexical characteristics of the specific words used will add an absolute minimum of bias/noise to the experiment in which they are applied.

Concept “humour” in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine

The purpose of this study was to define and to describe the semantic components of the stimulus word humour in the linguistic consciousness of young Russian-speaking people from Eastern Ukraine. The main method of the research was a psycholinguistic experiment. The sample comprised 400 young people (aged 20-31), males and females being equally represented. The experiment proved that the concept humour in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine is represented by four core semantic clusters: “laughter,” “joke,” “merry-making/joy” and “show.” Analysis of female and male associative fields shows that the semantic core of the word humour does not depend on the respondents’ gender identification. The results of frequency and cluster analysis have implied a number of the following conclusions. Firstly, humour and laughter form an inseparable unity of stimulus and reaction in the linguistic consciousness of respondents, although the psychological paradigm considers humour and laughter as two independent phenomena. Secondly, the cognitive component of humour was only reflected in the peripheral cluster “mind” of respondents’ associations. Thirdly, young Russian-speaking people from Ukraine do not have an ideal image of humour represented by a certain comedy show or relevant to any specific comedians. The generalised visualisation of humour is represented by reactions of the extreme periphery. Finally, comparative analysis of the verbalised concept humour in the linguistic consciousness of Russian-speaking population of Ukraine and people who live in Russia did not reveal any national-specific features in the perception of stimulus humour.

Concept «Religion» in the Consciousness of Young People: Psycholinguistic Analysis

Objective. The creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is the reason of religious discourse investigation. The aim of this research is to analyze concept “religion” in the consciousness of young people. Materials & Methods. Free word association test (WAT) has been used for psycholinguistic analysis. The respondents have been received a questionnaire with ten words-stimuli (related to religious discourse: clergyman, priest, theologian, church, religion, preaching, sacraments, faith, sin, prayer). In this article, we only analyzed associations for “religion”. The sample consisted of 246 students (biologists, psychologists and publishers) from Lesya Ukrainka Eastern European National University. Results. As a result of the free WAT, 258 responses to the stimulus word “religion” were, among them 106 different associations. Among the most frequent responses were “faith”, “Christianity”, “church” and “orthodoxy”. In general, respondents often associate religion with the church and specific faiths (in this case, Christianity and Orthodoxy). The grammar and logical characteristics of the obtained associations have been analyzed. It has been shown that central paradigmatic reactions to the stimulus word “religion” predominate. The thematic features of the associations to “religion” have been analyzed. Ten different thematic groups have been identified: faith; types and directions of religion; outlook; church; morality; emotions; people; negative evaluations. The most numerous thematic group is “faith” which binds “religion” with faith in God and higher powers. The least numerous thematic groups are “morality”, “emotions” and “people”. Conclusions. Students view religion on two sides. On the one hand, as a set of beliefs or a certain outlook. On the other hand, they restrict this concept to the community of like-minded, who meet in the church. In general, this thematic variety of the associations indicates a high level of students' awareness of the concept of “religion”. Prospects for further study of this problem lie in an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of religious discourse.