With the growing prevalence of health and illness narratives on digital platforms, research examining the social psychological processes involved in these storytelling environments remains scarce. This paper addresses this research gap by conducting a mixed-methods study of digital storytelling within the UK’s healthcare context, focusing on online consumer reviews of the medical memoir, Do no harm: stories of life, death and brain surgery (Marsh, 2014). Utilising computer-assisted text analysis methods of LIWC-22 and the Sketch Engine, linguistic cues for cognitive, affective, social and perceptual processes are identified in a corpus of online consumer reviews. A subsequent qualitative analysis, based on ‘narrative modulation’ (Huang, 2024, 2020), investigates the role of these processes in constructing and developing storylines across the user reviews. Finally, the study explores how consumer reviews in the form of ‘small stories’ challenge canonical narratives in the UK’s healthcare services. This research advances the field of narrative studies by emphasising the role of social psychological processes (Chung and Pennebaker, 2019) in modulating emerging, evolving and counter narratives in digital storytelling. The findings reveal an instrumental role of social psychological processes, as signalled by linguistic cues, in shaping narrative threads in online user reviews. This study not only develops narrative modulation as a valuable concept for narrative analysis, but also underscores its effectiveness when combined with computer-assisted text analysis tools for in-depth examinations of narrative data. Furthermore, it provides critical insights into digital storytelling in healthcare contexts, promoting knowledge transfer across narrative studies, stylistics, social psychology and medical humanities.

中文翻译：

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用社会心理过程编织叙事线索：医学回忆录在线消费者评论中的叙事调制


随着健康和疾病叙述在数字平台上的日益流行，研究这些讲故事环境中涉及的社会心理过程的研究仍然很少。本文通过对英国医疗保健背景下的数字叙事进行混合方法研究来解决这一研究差距，重点关注消费者对医学回忆录的在线评论， 不要伤害：生命、死亡和脑部手术的故事 （Marsh，2014）。利用 LIWC-22 和 Sketch Engine 的计算机辅助文本分析方法，在在线消费者评论语料库中识别认知、情感、社交和感知过程的语言线索。随后的定性分析基于 “叙事调制” （Huang， 2024， 2020），调查了这些过程在构建和发展用户评论中的故事情节中的作用。最后，该研究探讨了“小故事”形式的消费者评论如何挑战英国医疗保健服务中的规范叙述。本研究通过强调社会心理过程（Chung 和 Pennebaker，2019 年）在调节数字叙事中新兴、演变和对抗叙事中的作用，推进了叙事研究领域。研究结果揭示了社会心理过程在塑造在线用户评论中的叙事线索中的作用，正如语言线索所表明的那样。本研究不仅将叙事调制发展为叙事分析的一个有价值的概念，而且还强调了它与计算机辅助文本分析工具相结合以深入检查叙事数据时的有效性。 此外，它还为医疗保健环境中的数字叙事提供了重要见解，促进了叙事研究、文体学、社会心理学和医学人文学科之间的知识转移。