ABSTRACT The relationship between symbolic expression and affect tends to be investigated from the perspective of recipients in contexts like media, politics, and advertising. A more producer-centric context is picture-based counseling (PBC) where clients are prompted by counselors to interpret pictures creatively as part of the treatment process. Nevertheless, the affective and discursive outcomes of these interpretations remain poorly understood. This paper reports a combined experimental and discourse analytic study which compares prompting strategies in terms of affective engagement, contrasts the discourse characteristics of interpretations following “topic-present” and “topic-absent” prompting strategies, and offers potential implications for PBC practice. Analysis of skin conductance levels suggests that the two prompting strategies which invite symbolic interpretation are more affectively engaging than the literal control (F(2,32) = 6.356, p = .005), but not significantly different from each other. A follow-up discourse analysis revealed the prominence of metaphors in symbolic interpretations, as well as nuanced differences between the discourse outcomes of prompting strategies. Topic-present interpretations tended to produce more systematic ensembles of metaphorical expressions, while topic-absent interpretations were less systematic. The combined findings suggest that orienting clients towards symbolic interpretation is affectively engaging, but the ideal prompting strategy is best determined by context-specific circumstances to be judged by counselors.

中文翻译：

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基于图片的咨询中符号解释的情感和话语结果：皮肤电导和话语分析研究

摘要 在媒体、政治和广告等背景下，人们倾向于从接受者的角度来研究符号表达与情感之间的关系。一种更以生产者为中心的环境是基于图片的咨询 (PBC)，在这种情况下，咨询师会提示客户创造性地解释图片，作为治疗过程的一部分。然而，这些解释的情感和话语结果仍然知之甚少。本文报告了一项结合实验和话语分析的研究，该研究比较了情感参与方面的提示策略，对比了遵循“主题在场”和“主题缺席”提示策略的解释的话语特征，并为 PBC 实践提供了潜在的启示。皮肤电导水平的分析表明，这两种引起符号解释的提示策略比文字控制更具情感吸引力（F(2,32) = 6.356, p = .005），但彼此之间没有显着差异。后续的话语分析揭示了隐喻在符号解释中的突出地位，以及提示策略的话语结果之间的细微差别。主题存在的解释倾向于产生更系统的隐喻表达合奏，而主题缺失的解释则不太系统。综合研究结果表明，将来访者导向符号解释具有情感吸引力，但理想的提示策略最好由咨询师判断的具体情境来确定。