Eliciting adaptive emotion in conversations with parents of children receiving therapy for leukemia.

Clinician-parent communication may often be difficult, especially soon after the diagnosis. The aims of this paper are to identify the communication strategies associated with expressions of adaptive emotions in parents and to explore the effect of the type of leukaemia and of parent’s gender on parents’ expressions of emotions. The data are obtained from 4622 conversational turns of 20 videotaped interviews (EFI-C) with 10 mothers and 10 fathers of children at their first hospitalization for leukaemia. A coding scheme for parent emotional expressions was reliably applied by two independent judges. An original self-report questionnaire on parents’ emotional states was used before and after the interview. Positive politeness of interviewer elicits adaptive emotional expressions in parents. Mothers of children with AML and fathers of children with ALL appear more distressed during the interview. Our interview can be identified as an innovative technique of communication with parents of children with cancer.