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Category: Project

Description: This study examines how "face threats" such as requests, criticism and other potentially imposing utterances, are perceived in the context of physician-patient communication. Participants judged fictional physicians' trustworthiness and "facework" as well as the appropriateness of their utterances and the comprehensibility of the specialized concepts they used. Two experimental variations were realized: Face threats were either phrased politely or in an explicit manner and specialized concepts were either worded in everyday language terms ("rash") or in technical terms ("exanthema").