Dr. WAN Yau Ni, JennyJennyDr. WAN Yau NiDr. LI Wang On, AlexAlexDr. LI Wang On2026-07-132026-07-132026Wan, Y. N., & Li, W. O. (14 Jul 2026). Ethical considerations in health and care research: Analyzing post-traumatic stress disorder case reports in neurocognitive research. 51st International Systemic Functional Congress (ISFC), Hong Kong Metropolitan University.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/28151This paper examines how ethical concerns are linguistically constructed in clinical case reports on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), particularly those arising from social and natural disaster contexts. We employ Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze how neurocognitive journal writing encodes language dynamics in terms of clinician authority, patient experience, and ethical obligations. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines applied linguistics and neuroscience, our team has carefully investigated a corpus of 50 peer-reviewed case reports on PTSD published in leading open-access journals in ethics, psychiatry and neurology between 2000 and 2025. We employ a mixed method combining collocation analysis using corpus tools with close, SFL-informed discourse analysis. We statistically evaluate keyword lists and collocation profiles using log-likelihood to identify salient lexical items and phrase patterns associated with ethical themes, such as informed consent and confidentiality. The ethical dimensions and trauma awareness are also explored through thematic structure, cohesion and intertextual engagement. An applied-linguistic investigation is later triangulated with neuroethical insights from a neuroscience co-investigator to interpret clinical implications and disciplinary norms. Preliminary findings reveal that ethical concerns, patient experiences and clinician responsibility are often represented through nominalization, passive voice constructions, and modality. Patients are often positioned as objects of observation rather than narrators of their own trauma, raising discussions about role, representation and identity. We also examine appraisal and authorial voice to assess how understanding, empathy and ethical stance are distributed and exchanged. The study provides practical recommendations for producing both ethically and linguistically informed clinical narratives in PTSD research.enConference Paper