Topic
Distancing language
About: Distancing language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4 publications have been published within this topic receiving 130 citations.
Papers
TL;DR: Understanding of language-emotion interactions is extended and novel strategies for reducing negative affect are revealed, suggesting that distancing one's language in 1 domain produces shifts in deep representations of psychological distance that are measurable across domains.
Abstract: Effective emotion regulation is critical for mental health and well-being, rendering insight into underlying mechanisms that facilitate this crucial skill invaluable. We combined principles of cognitive linguistics and basic affective science to test whether shifting components of one's language might foster effective emotion regulation. In particular, we explored bidirectional relations between emotion regulation and linguistic signatures of psychological distancing. In Study 1, we assessed whether people spontaneously distance their language (i.e., shift their word use to be less socially and temporally proximate) when regulating emotions. Participants transcribed their thoughts while either passively viewing or actively regulating their emotional responses to negative images. Regulation increased linguistic markers of social and temporal distance, and participants who showed greater linguistic distancing were more successful regulators. Study 2 reversed this relation and investigated whether distancing one's language spontaneously regulated one's emotions. Participants wrote about negative images either using psychologically "close" or "distant" language in physical, social, and temporal domains. All 3 domains of linguistic distancing spontaneously reduced negative affect. Distancing language also "bled" across domains (e.g., temporal distancing spontaneously produced social distancing). This suggests that distancing one's language in 1 domain (e.g., reducing use of present-tense verbs) produces shifts in deep representations of psychological distance that are measurable across domains (e.g., reduced use of the word "I"). Results extend understanding of language-emotion interactions and reveal novel strategies for reducing negative affect. (PsycINFO Database Record
113 citations
1 Sep 2006
TL;DR: This article explored discourses of the real in commercial ethnographic research, and the transitions and transformations those discourses make possible and impossible, and explored how this epistemic culture has been created and its "real" consequences.
Abstract: This paper explores discourses of the ‘real’ in commercial ethnographic research, and the transitions and transformations those discourses make possible and impossible. A common strategy to legitimize industrial ethnography is to claim a special relationship to ‘real people’, or argue that one is capturing what is ‘really’ happening in ‘natural’ observation. Distancing language describes ‘insights’ into a situation somehow separate from ourselves, ‘findings’ and ‘quotes’ that we seemingly extract from one context and plunk in another. Whether it is chimps (in Jane Goodall's case) or consumers (in ours); we know what is going on or not. This model of ethnographic knowing has adopted the naturalistic science discourse of the behavioralist-the neutral observers in an environment. Here we explore how this epistemic culture has been created and its ‘real’ consequences. What we do not attempt is an assertion of the merits of one kind of ethnography over another, or a rehash of tired squabbles about ethnography as method versus ethnography as episteme. In fact, the authors themselves have been utterly complicit in producing discourses of ‘real people’ while holding epistemic allegiances elsewhere. Rather, we are more concerned to investigate the conditions, both within companies and for research agendas, that this way of talking effects. In our experience this language abdicates authorial responsibility, unduly reduces ethnography to “butterfly collecting” at the expense of other business opportunities.
40 citations
TL;DR: Parents' distancing language-language that requires cognitive abstraction and moves beyond the "here and now"-relates to children's literacy skills, but its association with mathematics remains unexamined.
17 citations
TL;DR: This article explored assumptions about race in the discipline of organization studies by introducing the notion of "interrogating whiteness" and examined what writers say about race when it is not the topic about which they claim to write.
Abstract: Assumptions about race in the discipline of organization studies are explored by introducing the notion of “interrogating whiteness”. Standpoint epistemology, which assumes people’s experiences are relevant to the ways they know, allows the apparently unmarked, neutral category of whiteness to be seen as one standpoint among many. To encourage a useful discussion of race, key terms are situated linguistically and historically, background is given on paradigms for thinking about race, and there is a consideration of the consequences of whiteness and blackness. I examine what writers say about race when it is not the topic about which they claim to write. The organizational life of the discipline and authorship is explored. I then turn to the organizational literature for further illustration of whiteness as unmarked, stereotypical examples, and distancing language.
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 1 |
| 2017 | 1 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2001 | 1 |