With the recent launch of the National Bereavement Care Pathways in the UK (http:// www.nbcpathway.org.uk/pathways/) that are designed to help professionals to support families in their bereavement after any pregnancy loss, there has been an increased interest in aligning the care provided to the needs that are expressed by the bereaved parents. In order to do this we need in-depth knowledge of these experiences. In this paper, we report findings from a study, conducted in England, that explored the ways in which those who have experienced pregnancy loss talk about their experiences at different stages in the diagnosis and experience of pregnancy loss. We focus both on what they say and the language they use to describe their experiences, in order to gain insights that may make it easier for those who support them through the process to do so in an effective manner. We focus in particular on the metaphors they use to describe their experiences. Metaphors are often used by people when describing intensely painful, personal experiences that would otherwise be inexpressible. Exploring the metaphors used by the bereaved allows us to gain deeper insights into what they are going through and understanding these metaphors may allow us to support them more effectively. We also examined the accounts of midwives and other NHS maternity bereavement care practitioners in order to gain insights into their perspectives on the issues identified through our analysis of the metaphors used by the bereaved, and to identify areas of good practice which correspond to the experiences of the bereaved. We were interested in their own practice but also in the environment in which they work and the constraints that this sometimes brings.
Pregnancy loss, encompassing miscarriage, stillbirth and termination for foetal abnormality, can be considered a
particularly intense and unique form of bereavement, which engenders difficult or painful emotions. When people are talking about
such emotions, they have been found to make extensive use of metaphor (Semino, 2011).
In this paper, we use metaphor analysis of a small corpus of interviews with individuals in England who have suffered such losses,
and people who support them, to explore the nature of the bereavement. In particular, we focus on the ways in which metaphor is
used to describe the experience of the loss, the effects that this loss has on people’s conceptions of themselves and their
bodies, and the implications this has for recovery. We identify a number of characteristics that can lead the bereaved to
conceptualise their realities in different ways, which have implications for the grieving process, the ways in which people
respond to their grief, and ultimately their recovery.
Male gray treefrogs call to attract females under challenging acoustic conditions. At higher chorus densities, there is considerable background noise and a good chance that a male's calls will often be overlapped by calls of other individuals. Call overlap may reduce the probability of mating because females prefer calls with internal pulse structure that is not obscured. With increases in acoustic stimulation, males lengthen call duration while simultaneously reducing call rate such that "pulse effort" changes little. In our study, we tested the "interference risk hypothesis." This proposes that males change call duration so that, on average, there will be a sufficient number of pulses and interpulse intervals clear of acoustic interference per call to attract a female. However, female choice experiments employing call alternatives of different durations, rates, intensity levels, and degrees of call overlap refuted this hypothesis. Our results leave open the possibilities that the dynamic shift in the two components of pulse effort are related to the problem of call detection in a noisy environment or are responses by males to the perceived threat of competition for females.
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