33.1780, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Psycholinguistics: Robles, Weatherall (2021)

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Subject: 33.1780, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Psycholinguistics: Robles, Weatherall (2021)

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Date: Wed, 18 May 2022 16:40:25
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at helsinki.fi]
Subject: How Emotions Are Made in Talk

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36738777


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2216.html

EDITOR: Jessica S. Robles
EDITOR: Ann  Weatherall
TITLE: How Emotions Are Made in Talk
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 321
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, University of Helsinki

SUMMARY

Many scholars interested in emotions are familiar with Feldman Barrett’s
(2017) book “How Emotions Are Made,” which is a psychologist and
neuroscientist’s explanation of how emotions are made in the interaction of
the brain with the body and culture. The title of the present book suggests
that it complements accounts of what happens in the brain through explaining
“How Emotions Are Made in Talk”.  

The first chapter in “How Emotions Are Made in Talk” is a short preface by
Anssi Peräkylä, who has edited a well-known volume on the language of
emotions, “Emotion in Interaction”, together with Marja-Leena Sorjonen (2012).
The title of his preface, “Emotion as an emergent theme in conversation
analysis” robustly locates the current volume in the field of conversation
analysis. Peräkylä points out that there are both similarities and differences
between the two volumes in that they cover partly the same topics. He
concludes by stating that conversation analysis now begins to be in a place
where it can “answer some questions regarding psychology in social interaction
that Goffman posed many years ago” (p. xvi).

The editors of “How Emotions Are Made in Talk”, Ann Weatherall and Jessica S.
Robles, also refer to Peräkylä and Sorjonen’s “Emotion in Interaction” in
their introduction that is titled “How emotions are made to do things”. They
suggest that their volume not only sheds further light on emotions in
interaction but also “present[s] a new generation of conversation analytic
studies at the cutting edge of scholarship” (p. 2). They then proceed to
precisely explaining, “How emotions are made to do things”. Starting from
“Terminology and emotions research”, they tour previous research into emotions
and interaction, including seminal work by Goffman, consider “Methodological
issues”, discuss the problematics of naming emotions, note that emotion
displays are often nonverbal, and give an example of a conversation where
emotion occurs. They thus go a long way into preparing for the studies
presented in the book, whose contents they then briefly summarize.

The studies in the volume are divided into three groups; they come under the
headings “The social moral ordering of emotions”, “Emotions as temporally
unfolding”, and “Displays of emotion”. The data for “The social and moral
ordering of emotions” comes from sports settings, a telephone call between a
father and mother who disagree about the father’s responsibilities, and calls
to a telephone helpline. “Emotions as temporally unfolding” in their turn
unfold in troubles talk, complaining and children’s reciprocal laughter.
Lastly, the “Displays of emotion” occur in various contexts: a “call between
two sisters, a child protection helpline, a doctor-patient palliative care
interaction[,] an emotion-focused therapy session” (p. 189), parent-child
interaction, “language therapy sessions for people with post-stroke aphasia”
(p. 233), and contexts where people express pain.    
 
The very first study is written by Edward Reynolds, whose topic is “Emotional
intensity as a resource for moral assessments: The action of ‘incitement’ in
sports settings”. He first analyses interactions in a gym, illustrating
transcripts with photos and timelines of utterances. Then he moves on to
analyze some interaction in basketball, including photos and a pitch contour
image of a player’s utterance “Watch mine watch mine deep deep deep” (p. 41).
He concludes his analysis section by returning to the gym; looking at a
situation where Chris fails in a task, she has set for herself. Again, the
analysis contains photos, a timeline “for failure” (p. 44) and a pitch trace
image. In the discussion, Reynolds summarizes his research as showing how
“participants enact a public form of arousal as a resource for regulating the
sports conduct of others” (p. 46). He claims that when someone incites another
person to do well in sports, it as if becomes a moral obligation for the
latter person to succeed.   

The second research chapter also concerns moral obligations. It is called
“Affect in interaction: Working out expectancies and responsibility in a phone
call” and written by Bryanna Hebenstreit and Alan Zemel. They analyse a
telephone call between “Mom” and “Dad” where the two discuss Dad’s failure to
pick up his children as expected by Mom. In this conversation, Mom blames Dad
for the failure, but Dad refuses to accept the blame. While Mom is of the
opinion that Dad should have known what to do, Dad counters by suggesting that
she should have explicitly informed him of what he was supposed to do.
Hebenstreit and Zemel have titled the turns in the conversation as follows:
“Marking the breach”, “Exposing the breach”, “Escalation”, and
“De-escalation”. They suggest that they have been able to describe a situation
where genuine apologies were expected but not offered.  

The editor Ann Weatherall herself has written the third chapter in the book,
“Displaying emotional control by how crying and talking are managed”. She is
interested in situations where someone is “flooding out”: in Goffman’s work,
“[f]looding out referred to a moment where an emotional outburst immobilised
an individual, even if momentarily, from interpersonal engagement” (p. 78).
She analyses what the callers and call-takers do in such situations, giving
examples of the following options: “Resuming talk after crying interrupts it”,
“Crying speaker resumes talk after a call-taker takes a turn”, “Talk after
crying in a transition relevant space”, and “Resuming talk after crying when
no-one is speaking”.  “Transition relevant” here means a space where “speaker
transition can occur” (p. 89). Weatherall shows that even if the callers
cannot help crying, they are able to resume talk and focus on the matter at
hand. The call-takers in her data may seem somewhat “cold” but this is because
their primary task is “not to provide emotional and practical support … but
rather to transfer or refer the caller to the services that do provide that
help directly” (pp. 94-95). 

The second section of the volume that focuses on “Emotions as temporally
unfolding” begins with a chapter written by Jessica S. Robles, Stephen M.
DiDomenico and Joshua Raclaw. They write about “Using objects and technologies
in the immediate environment as resources for managing displays in troubles
talk”. They analyze situations where “laptops and smartphones … become
consequential to the display of affect and affiliation in the context of
troubles talk” (p. 107). They are interested both in situations where the
listeners affiliate with troubles talk and in situations where they do not
provide as much affiliation as expected. They point out that the laptops and
smartphones can be used to regulate the conversation because they as if
provide a legitimate reason to focus on something else than the troubles talk
or even to change the topic of conversation. This applies to both the troubles
tellers and the persons who listen to them. To the troubles tellers, the
laptop may provide a kind of shield behind which they can hide. Robles,
DiDomenico and Raclaw’s chapter is illustrated by screenshots of the
situations which they analyze. For example, in figure 2 we can see a young
woman duck her head behind the laptop and pull her hair back (pp. 113-114).  

In the next chapter, we move from troubles telling to complaining. Johanna
Ruusuvuori, Birte Asmuss, Pentti Henttonen and Niklas Ravaja analyze
”complaining about third parties in the institutional situation of performance
appraisal reviews” (p. 129). Their contribution is titled “Shared affective
stance displays as preliminary to complaining”. The performance appraisal
reviews under scrutiny have taken place in Finland and Denmark. The authors
provide us with examples both of cases where the managers and employees reach
a shared affective stance, which makes it easier for the employees to complain
about a third person, and with examples where the managers do not explicitly
share the employees’ stance. They suggest that the former kind of situations
make the managers and employees more democratic than the latter and foster
good communication. When the managers share the employees’ affective stance,
they simultaneously validate it. This chapter is illustrated by drawings; for
example, in figure 4, a “manager smiles minimally” (p. 153). 

The third chapter about unfolding emotions takes us to the kindergarten.
Emilia Strid and Asta Cekaite tell us about “Embodiment in reciprocal
laughter: Sharing laughter, gaze, and embodied stance in children’s peer
group”.  Their chapter is richly illustrated by drawings depicting the
children and their teachers in three different situations. In the first
situation, a “multiparty laughing bout” (p. 167) emerges after a teacher says
something that the children think is funny. In the second situation, the
teacher tells about the reception class that the children will go to before
they start in the real school, and one girl comments, which results in
laughter between herself and another girl. In the third situation, a teacher
and three children sit at the lunch table when the children start laughing.
The laughter continues although the teacher reprimands the children. Strid and
Cekaite conclude that “[l]aughter [is] not only a vocal phenomenon but an
embodied action” (p. 183), and it is action that the children do together. 

As stated above, the last four chapters of the book are grouped under the
rubric “Displays of emotion”. The first of them, “Responding emphatically from
shifting epistemic terrains” by Joseph Ford and Alexa Hepburn begins by
discussing how conversation analysts have understood and studied empathy. Ford
and Hepburn choose to define empathy as a “display of understanding that is
done semantically rather than through prosody” (p. 190). The emphasis is on
the word understanding – the person who shows empathy does not feel the same
emotion as the recipient of empathy. An example is a situation where a
call-taker in a helpline responds to a caller by saying, “You sound as though
you’re very upset about it” (p. 195). Ford and Hepburn are interested in
empathy in different environments and illustrate with various examples. Their
aim is to see what the different settings have in common and where they
differ. For instance, a doctor talking with a patient with terminal cancer
will respond differently to the patient than a therapist who wants their
patient to talk soothingly to her inner child. 

Next, Hansun Zhang Waring’s chapter takes us back to children’s world. It is
about “Socializing the emotions of joy and surprise in parent-child
interaction”. The data for the study comes from a “large corpus of 148 hours
of 35 video-recorded mealtime interaction [sic] between a three-year-old child
Zoe … and her parents” (p. 216), of whom Zhang Waring is the Mom. The chapter
is illustrated by screenshots from the videos where Dad and Zoe enact joy and
surprise individually and together. Zhang Waring underlines that Dad tailors
her enactments of joy and surprise to Zoe who in her turn does not reciprocate
in exactly the same manner but is creative in her own behavior. Zhang Waring
also has another point of emphasis: She says that there is plenty of research
on the socialization of negative emotions. However, we should shift the focus
to positive emotions and really look at what people, especially children, are
doing, rather than estimating what they are thinking.

The book then moves from laughter to crying, in Sara Merlino’s chapter
“Haptics and emotions in speech and language therapy sessions for people with
post-stroke aphasia”. The title is slightly misleading in that the chapter
focuses on a single patient, a “71-year old man diagnosed with aphasia that
resulted from a stroke in his left temporal lobe” (p. 238). Merlino analyzes
his meetings with two speech and language therapists. The gist of the matter
is that the patient has a tendency to burst into crying and needs to be
soothed. The therapists tend to touch his hand or hands to calm him down. On
one occasion, the patient seeks for consolation by touching the therapist’s
hands. The chapter includes many drawings showing the patient and therapist
together or the patient alone. 

Lastly, in the volume, Amanda McArthur reports on “Affect and accountability:
Pain displays as a resource for action”. Her chapter contains a lengthy
introduction to the ontology of pain. The point is that while pain is not
necessarily considered an emotion, it seems to overlap with emotion: there is
medical evidence that pain and emotion occur simultaneously in the brain, and
“[p]henomenologists and historians of pain have also long argued that the
physical sensation of pain cannot be separated from our emotional reaction to
it” (p. 266). McArthur focuses on pain displays such as “arghhh*hhh” and “ow”
or wincing that patients produce when visiting the doctor. She suggests that
there is something performative in them. On the one hand, people think it is
all right to display pain because it is something a person cannot control;
but, on the other hand, the patients tend to display pain at very suitable
junctions, suggesting an element of control.  

There is also some extra material in the book. The author bios can be found
between the table of contents and the preface. A transcription glossary and a
four-page index appear as appendices after the last chapter.    

EVALUATION

Since this volume seems to be designed as a sequel to Peräkylä and Sorjonen’s
volume Emotion in interaction (2012), the question arises how well this is
accomplished. I do not dare say anything definitive, but offer some comments.
Firstly, it is clear that Peräkylä and Sorjonen’s (2012) book has a special
status within emotion research. In the Helsinki University library, for
example, it is available as a course book. The same does not yet apply to How
Emotions Are Made in Talk, which is available in e-form, but time will tell. 

In his book note on Emotion in Interaction, Hoey (2013: 596) states the
following: “The volume would be a key reference for students and professionals
interested in interactional approaches to language use, sociality, and
psychology.” This can be compared with what it says on the back cover of How
Emotions Are Made in Talk: “This volume should be of interest to interactional
scholars and researchers interested in social approaches to emotion, and
addresses a range of scholarship across the disciplines of sociology,
communication, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology.” 

If we consider the topics covered by the two books, Peräkylä’s preface is
right: they overlap to a notable extent. Both books consider adult-child
interaction, complaints and complaining, laughter, crying, surprise and
empathy. Moreover, both volumes include drawings, photos/screenshots and pitch
tracks. Indeed, both books even include a section on transcription conventions
and an index.

Interestingly, while the newer book begins with a preface by Peräkylä, the
older book ends in an epilogue by him. In my opinion, the said epilogue would
also serve well as an introduction to the newer book. In it, Peräkylä (2012)
considers the theoretical side of all the practical studies included in
Emotion in Interaction. He talks, for example, about the importance of shared
emotions. He talks about the centrality of emotional expression, not only
because it shows what a person is feeling but also because it serves social
interaction. Moreover, he talks of emotion as realized in action tendencies.
He claims that action and emotion are “inherently intertwined” (p. 281). He
also considers socialization and emotion contagion. He says that the
contributions to the older volume “illustrate practices of emotion work” (p.
285) and goes on to add: “they illustrate that feeling rules of society do not
influence individuals directly but rather in and through the interactional
practices through which the emotional displays are shaped moment by moment”
(p. 286). All these theoretical considerations apply very well to the newer
volume as well.

To consider Robles and Weatherall’s statement that their book “present[s] a
new generation of conversation analytic studies at the cutting edge of
scholarship” (p. 2), we can compare the lists of authors of the two books.
There is a little overlap: both books feature work by Asta Cekaite, Johanna
Ruusuvuori, and Alexa Hepburn. However, most of the authors have indeed
changed. 

While it is good to be aware that Robles and Weatherall seem to consider
Peräkylä and Sorjonen’s (2012) book as a pioneering ideal, it is important to
point out that their book also relates to other books and has merits of its
own. I would like to mention here a book that I have reviewed earlier for
Linguist List, Emotion in Multilingual Interaction, edited by Prior and Kasper
(2016; Tissari 2017). It discussed very similar issues, but from a slightly
different point of view, as it was focusing on situations where people spoke a
second or foreign language. Prior and Kasper’s (2016) book in fact even shares
one author, Asta Cekaite, with the volume under review.   

To return briefly to the comparison between Emotion in Interaction (Peräkylä &
Sorjonen 2012) and How Emotions Are Made in Talk, the latter does not have a
theoretical section at the end, but it has a rather lengthy theoretical
section in the introduction. In addition, the division of the book into three
different sections reflects deep theoretical thinking. Emotions are displayed,
they unfold temporally, and there is a “social moral ordering” to them. All
this of course is related to the conceptualization of emotions expressed in
Peräkylä and Sorjonen’s title Emotion in Interaction: it is interaction all
the way through.

Of the new things that Weatherall and Robles’s book brings to the table, I
personally appreciated the chapter on pain displays by McArthur. She was able
to explain very well why some people do not consider pain an emotion and why
others do. She also provided an interesting account of what happens at
doctor’s appointments when people display pain. I bought her idea that such
displays of pain are in fact relatively controlled displays of pain rather
than something the patients cannot help doing.  

Since I am not a practicing conversation analyst myself, it was sometimes
challenging to keep track of all that was occurring in the conversations that
were analyzed. This applied, for example, to Robles, DiDomenico and Raclaw’s
chapter on objects and technologies as resources for managing affect displays.
Above all, it probably indicates that their data was very rich. I in fact
enjoyed the richness of data that was provided in not only transcripts but
also pictures and photos/screenshots in many of the articles, including
theirs. 

If I may, I will conclude by picking out my favorite chapters from the volume.
That they are my favorites does not say anything about the rest of the book;
this choice is subjective. I admired the detail in which Hebenstreit and Zemel
analyzed Mom and Dad’s conversation in their chapter on how Mom and Dad dealt
with Mom’s disappointment in Dad’s behavior. Similarly, when I read Merlino’s
chapter on the speech and language therapy given to a patient with post-stroke
aphasia, it was almost as if I had been there. It was all so clearly explained
and beautifully illustrated with drawings. Finally yet importantly, the
articles on children’s expression of emotion were not only endearing, but also
the transcripts and images worked very well hand in hand. I am now referring
to Strid and Cekaite’s chapter on “Embodiment in reciprocal laughter” and
Zhang Waring’s chapter on “Socializing the emotions of joy and surprise in
parent-child interaction”. I agree with Zhang Waring that we need more
research into how children are socialized into displaying positive emotions.  

REFERENCES 

Feldman Barrett, Lisa. 2017. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the
Brain. Boston: Mariner Books.
 
Hoey, Elliott M. 2013. Review of Anssi Peräkylä & Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds.)
Emotion in Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Language in
Society (42). 595-596.

Peräkylä, Anssi. 2012. Epilogue. In: Anssi Peräkylä & Marja-Leena Sorjonen
(eds.) Emotion in Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press. 274-289.

Peräkylä, Anssi & Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds.). 2012. Emotion in Interaction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prior, Matthew T. & Gabriele Kasper. 2016. Emotion in Multilingual
Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Tissari, Heli. 2017. Review of Prior, Matthew T. & Gabriele Kasper. Emotion in
Multilingual Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. LinguistList 17
April. 
< https://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-4298/>


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari has specialized in words and metaphors for emotions in the
English language and their histories since around 1450. At the time of writing
this review, she was working as a substitute lecturer of English at the
Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. She is currently a
member of a team which investigates people's fond memories of the music of
digital games (''Game Music Everyday Memories''). Her role is to be the
cognitive linguist in the team while the other members represent musicology
and game studies.





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