Prompting strategies and outcomes in picture-based counseling
Author(s)
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Singapore: Springer
ISBN
978-981-15-4389-0
978-981-15-4388-3
Citation
In Watson, B. & Kreiger, J. (Eds.). 2020. Expanding horizons in health communication: An asian perspective (pp. 29-46). Singapore: Springer.
Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
Pictures are an innovative resource in the verbal activity of psychological counseling (Ginicola, Smith, & Trzaska, 2012; Malchiodi, 2011). Counselors often guide clients to interpret and explore them as figurative representations of their situation (Stevens & Spears, 2009). Picture-based counseling is, however, underexplored from both clinical and discourse perspectives, with few published guidelines and analyses of the nature of counselor prompts and client interpretations. Informed by metaphor theory, this paper examines 34 counterbalanced matched-pairs of elicited picture interpretations responding to either a topic-present or topic-absent prompt in Mandarin Chinese. Topic-present metaphor prompts indicate a specific topic to be connected to the picture, while topic-absent metaphor prompts do not. The resulting transcripts were coded for five variables reflecting key aspects of metaphor construction—sources, topics, source–topic connections, uncertainty markers, and metaphor signals. Spearman correlations were calculated and compared across the two prompt conditions, supported by qualitative analysis of examples. Results show stronger correlations and by implication greater integration among the variables in the topic-present condition. This suggests that people are better able to contextualize pictorial elements to a specified target topic of discussion. The present findings motivate follow-up research incorporating more direct counseling outcome measures.
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