Seminar SCALab 28/09/2023

Peter Muntigl de l'Université de Gand (Belgique) invité par Marie-Charlotte Gandolphe (DEEP)

Title : Emotion in Interaction
Peter Muntigl, Ghent University (Belgium) and Simon Fraser University (Canada)

Abstract:
For this talk, rather than taking a psychological perspective in which emotions are ‘internal’ and also identifiable via ratings, scales, participant observations, etc., I will take an interactional perspective that is grounded in the principles and methods of conversation analysis / CA (Sidnell and Stivers, 2013). In this approach, emotions are examined in naturalistic settings with respect to the following: 1) The accomplishment of emotions in conversational sequences with respect to how they are occasioned, displayed and received; 2) How emotions are grounded in participants’ perspectives as they are displayed in real-time, unfolding conversations; and 3) Using materials – in the form of transcripts, audio- and video-recordings – that serve to illustrate and identify the fine-grained resources that interactants use to display emotions. In the first part of the talk, I will present the basic CA approach that is used to examine emotions in interaction. Next, drawing from video-recordings of psychotherapy involving clinically depressed clients, I will show how different emotional displays (e.g., crying, laughter) can be analyzed as ‘actions in context’. In the final part of this talk, I discuss the strengths of this interactional approach and how it can provide new insights into emotion research. It will be argued that it can extend our understanding of embodied actions clients display as both a collection of ‘emotional features’ and as interactional resources therapists draw upon to facilitate therapeutic intervention.

Bibliography
Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Wiley-Blackwell.