Empathy as dynamic social meaning-making: audience responses to patient-generated materials about endometriosis care
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Elisabeth El Refaie
Elisabeth El Refaie is a Reader Emerita in Multimodality at Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. She has published widely on visual/multimodal forms of narrative and rhetoric, including in her two monographs,
Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012, University Press of Mississippi) andVisual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives (2019, Oxford University Press). In recent years, she has developed and run workshops that encourage people to share their views and emotions on sensitive topics by creating their own visual metaphors (drawingout.uk). Her current research focuses on the links between metaphor, creativity, and empathy, with a particular focus on health and environmental communication.
Abstract
This article uses 25 Think Aloud interviews to investigate the ability of patient-generated multimodal materials about endometriosis health care in the National Health Service Wales, UK, to evoke empathy in others. Critically evaluating relevant findings from several disciplines, empathy is reconceptualized as a dynamic and context-dependent form of social meaning-making. The combination of thematic analysis with a dynamic-systems approach to discourse analysis enabled the distinction between four interactive processes involved in empathy – “recognition”, “resonance”, “alignment”, and “affiliation” – as well as revealing common linguistic resources used to express or withhold empathy in the data. Specifically, the study findings show that an individual’s socially situated identities, as well as their own experiences of a particular healthcare system, may encourage or impede their empathic responses to representations of other people’s suffering.
About the author
Elisabeth El Refaie is a Reader Emerita in Multimodality at Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. She has published widely on visual/multimodal forms of narrative and rhetoric, including in her two monographs, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012, University Press of Mississippi) and Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives (2019, Oxford University Press). In recent years, she has developed and run workshops that encourage people to share their views and emotions on sensitive topics by creating their own visual metaphors (drawingout.uk). Her current research focuses on the links between metaphor, creativity, and empathy, with a particular focus on health and environmental communication.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Sofia Gameiro, who supported the original design of the study and provided invaluable feedback on an early draft of this article, and the three perceptive anonymous reviewers for this journal, although any errors that remain are, of course, my sole responsibility. I am also grateful to the following students who contributed to the data collection and transcription: Aya Asaad, Axel Bergstrom, Samantha Fulton, Ffion Lewis, Charlotte Lloyd, Sagoon Paudel, and Lois Rogers.
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