Language and emotion in health communication

Communicating about one's physical and/or emotional health occurs in healthcare settings where, increasingly, the client or the practitioner (or possibly both) communicate in their non-preferred language. Here we examine research that focuses on the way in which clients and practitioners use language to communicate emotion and consider how multilingual speakers are affected in their ability to communicate about physical or mental health by the language they use. We also discuss how one's use of language to express emotion is responded to (or not) by the other in the healthcare communication context, including in therapeutic settings. In reviewing the extant literature, we highlight some of the methodologies used to reveal emotional language use in conversation and the methods currently available to determine whether such conversations meet the speakers' objectives.