Language, culture and emotions: Exploring ethnic minority patients’ emotional expressions in primary healthcare consultations

Conceptualizing emotion in healthcare interpreting: A normative approach to interpreters’ emotion work

“…A study found mental health providers hold paradoxical attitudes about interpreters' role, describing ''the interpreter as both an obstacle and a facilitator of the empathic process, helping them to develop, and at times inhibiting, a sense of empathic connectivity with the client'' [46]. The complexity of cross-cultural implications and clinical meanings of individuals' emotions has been a challenging issue for healthcare professionals [6]. Without adequate clinical knowledge and cross-cultural training, an interpreter may inadvertently heighten, minimize, or overlook a patient's or a provider's emotions and emotion work, contributing to compromised care.…”

“…Numerous studies have demonstrated that healthcare professionals' emotional management and emotion work can have an important impact on patients' quality of care and health outcomes [4][5][6]. However, such emotion labor also can be draining, often resulting in individuals' experiences of stress and burnout [7][8][9][10].…”

Race/ethnicity and Americans’ experiences with treatment decision making

“…Communication skills training programs targeting patient-centered care can contribute to alleviating racial/ethnic disparities in health care resulting from variations in patient-physician communication. Encouraging physicians to engage in communication that addresses the individual needs of minority patients is widely considered a promising strategy, however, previous studies have documented several barriers to changing communication patterns, including lack of cultural competence, time constraints, and language differences [31][32][33][34], which will need to be surmounted in future efforts.…”

Long-term effects of empathy training in surgery residents: a one year follow-up study

“…Difficulties arising from cross-cultural misunderstandings and language barriers were mentioned by a few participants. It has been shown that there is a strong relationship between language proficiency and the expression of emotional cues by patients from ethnic minorities [23]. This could present an additional obstacle to effective communication with patients, thus making it difficult for physicians to understand patients' emotional states and reducing empathic connections.…”