Concept of Health in Linguistic Consciousness of Teenagers 13–16 years old with Congenital Heart Disease and Their Conventionally Healthy Peers

The article features the cognitive signs of the concept ‘health’ in the linguistic consciousness of teenagers (13–16 y.o.) operated for congenital heart disease and their conventionally healthy peers. It is the first of its kind linguistic study of the concept of health in the worldview of patients vs. their healthy counterparts. The associative field of the concept was based on a directed associative experiment that featured the word “health” as stimulus. The research objective was to identify the effect of health status on the cognitive signs of the concept in the linguistic consciousness of teenagers. The general population included 167 associates from 56 teenagers with congenital heart disease and 135 reactions from their 56 healthy peers. In both groups, the core of the concept included signs related to medical treatment and a healthy lifestyle or sports; however, the children with congenital heart disease gave more reactions related to the body and its functioning. The conventionally healthy teenagers provided a richer thematic classification, lexical diversity, and personal attitude. Verbs were almost entirely absent from both reaction groups, which might indicate that modern teenagers perceive health as something they cannot affect, despite giving numerous associates related to sports and healthy life style. With regard to the value component, the teenagers with congenital heart disease associated health with life while their healthy peers associated it with happiness. For children with congenital heart disease, health is a condition of survival, which depends more on doctors than on themselves and is in constant dichotomy to illness.

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