Psycholinguistic Paradigm of the Medical Staff – Patients Communicative Interaction in the Conditions of COVID-19 in Ukraine and Scotland

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this research is, based on the results of our empirical research, to determine the psycholinguistic paradigms of the Medical staff – Patients communicative interaction in the conditions of COVID-19 in Ukraine and Scotland, in particular in the context of the perception of the emotional concepts by respondents. Methods. The main method of our research is a psycholinguistic experiment, the main stage of which was the exemplification experiment. It is the experiment that allows us to make a specific idea of the concept, the result of which is the selection of a set of lexical units representing some object. As additional methods we used oral interviews and questionnaires for the method of psychological diagnosis of “The Methodology for the psychological diagnostics of coping mechanisms” by Heim (2022). Results. Among the main associations of Ukrainians we should note a lexical unit “to die”, which is the most frequent characteristics of the youngest respondents (in age of 31–55 years old). In addition their behavior is also characterized by a reaction of “fear” – “to be scared”, “to fade” (relevant for people from 31 to 77 years old), “to complain”, “to suffer” (they are typical for respondents of 31–55 years old). Respondents of all age groups who were treated at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh (Scotland) recorded categorically different aspects of the unit “fear” by derivative word-forming units which explain: a personal state of the individual: synonymous adjectives “fearful” and “fearsome” – full of fear; traits of the character of the person (which in 96.69% of cases belonged to the Medical Staff, and only 1.54% of cases – to patients); negative assessment of the threat object; a manner of the person’s behavior. Conclusions. Ukrainian patients’ perception of “bad news” should be divided into two phases: the first one is existential. It is characterized by fear, despair, destruction of life plans. The second phase is mobilization, when personal resources are activated, including their adaptive and relatively adaptive coping, and “bad news” is a trigger for fight with the disease COVID-19. Respondents from Scotland think that archilexem of field “fear” is a diffuse unit “a fear of COVID-19” with a lot of meanings, which plays the role of hyperonym for all other synonyms which have the function of nominees of fear. We are talking about the actualization of conceptual structures of the meanings of synonyms which denote the forms of prototype emotion “a fear of getting sick with COVID-19”.