Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen present a collection of studies on emotion in natural interaction. The volume emerges from the need in emotion research to consider participants' understandings of emotion in the unfolding course of action and is intended to address four questions: How are verbal, vocal, and nonvocal resources used to constitute emotional stances in interaction? How do these stances contribute to sequences of action? How does institutional setting contextualize the regulation and management of emotion? And, how might this research inform our understanding of language and social interaction? These questions are considered over twelve articles, in which the contributors tackle the issue from multiple angles and at varying levels of granularity.
Chs. 2 and 3 focus on parent-child interaction, with Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Asta Cekaite, & Charles Goodwin (Ch. 2) taking an ecumenical perspective in their analysis of children's responses to directives: the authors stress the multimodal (i.e. embodied, prosodic, and verbal) and socially situated quality of affective stances. This approach contrasts with and complements the dominant line of research, which tends to treat emotion as a decontextualized phenomenon occurring within the psychology of the individual. Anthony Wootton (Ch. 3) also focuses on parent-child interactions, specifically on the formal expression and distributional occurrence of distress in children.
Chs. 4–6 investigate emotion in particular activities. Anssi Peräkylä & Johanna Ruusuvuori examine the types of affective and interactional work accomplished by facial expressions in the context of pursuing uptake at a story's end. Douglas Maynard & Jeremy Freese (Ch. 5) and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (Ch. 6) both look at prosodic resources, the former in terms of how prosody relates to the valence of a news delivery, and the latter as a device for affiliating or disaffiliating with a complaint.
Chs. 7–9 address particular linguistic and paralinguistic forms. Auli Hakulinen & Marja-Leena Sorjonen consider a particular response cry in Finnish, voi että, which displays sensitivity to sequential or affective ambiguity in prior talk. Markku Haakana focuses on fake laughter, showing how “lexicalized” laugh tokens reveal members' understandings of the typical organization of laughter and its affective import. Alexa Hepburn & Jonathan Potter review their work on crying, its transcription, and responses to crying, paying particular attention to empathy and sympathy in institutional and mundane situations.
The management and organization of emotion in institutional settings are the concern of Chs. 10–12. Materiality is implicated in the article by Christian Heath, Dirk vom Lehn, Jason Cleverly, & Paul Luff, which investigates the orchestration and achievement of surprise among gallery and museum-goers. Empathy is examined by Liisa Voutilainen (Ch. 11) and John Heritage & Anna Lindström (Ch. 12), who examine, respectively, psychotherapists' responses to patients' disclosures of negative emotional experiences, and the accomplishment of empathic union between a nurse and a new mother.
Anssi Peräkylä's epilogue summarizes how the volume addresses the aforementioned questions, contextualizing its findings along psychological, sociological, and evolutionary dimensions. Emotion in interaction, overall, demonstrates how emotion is situated within and emerges from talk and interaction. The volume would be a key reference for students and professionals interested in interactional approaches to language use, sociality, and psychology.
