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 PERKYL, A. (2012) Epilogue: what
does the study of interaction offer to
emotion reserach. Pp. 274-289 in Perkyl,
A, Sorjonen, M-L. (eds) Emotion in
Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

CHAPTER
w
Epilogue
What Does the Study of Interaction Offer to
Emotion Research?
ANSSI PER K YL

I n this final chapter of the volume, we will elaborate on some of the results pre-
sented in the other chapters, in the light of some basic tenets of psychological,
sociological, and evolutionary research on emotion. In general terms, we argue that
the studies presented in this volume offer a new interactional perspective to many
key phenomena of previous research on emotion.

WHAT DID WE FIND OUT IN THIS VOLUME?

Before specifying the new interactional perspective that the contributions to this
volume offer to emotion research, we will try to sum up some of the key results of
these contributions by reference to the questions that this volume set out to exam-
ine. Only some features of the rich contributions can be highlighted here.

Question 1: How are emotional stances expressed and displayed verbally and nonverbally
in social interaction?
The collection demonstrates the need for taking into account the holistic character
of expressing emotional stance. While all contributions to this volume enrich our un-
derstanding of the verbal and nonverbal means of conveying emotion in social interac-
tion, the chapters dealing with prosody perhaps stand out as particularly rich and
original. These chapters show specific prosodic patterns conveying emotion in partic-
ular social actions such as refusals (Goodwin and her colleagues, chapter 2), delivery of
good or bad news (Maynard and Freese, chapter 5) or complaint stories (Couper-Kuhlen,

( )

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 EPILOGUE

chapter 6), as well as in relation to crying (Hepburn and Potter, chapter 9) and (fake)
laughter (Haakana, chapter 8). Several chapters also show ways in which the prosodic
displays of different speakers in action sequences are coordinated (through matching or
upgrading), to create scenes of affiliation or empathyor the lack of them. Regarding
nonvocal means of emotional expression, some context-specific uses of facial expres-
sions (Perkyl and Ruusuvuori, chapter 4; Heath and his colleagues, chapter 10; Good-
win and her colleagues, chapter 2) were explored; these studies show how classical
basic emotion expressions (see below), as well as more complex expressions, are put in
interactional use. The relative alignment of bodies of participants in interaction, con-
veying stance toward the other or toward a proposed course of action, were examined
by Goodwin and her colleagues. As for verbal means of expression of emotion, contribu-
tions to our understanding of response cries (cf. Goffman, 1978) deserve specific men-
tioning: we learned about the ways in which response cries in response to storytelling
can convey affiliation, but need subsequent verbal reinforcement to fully accomplish
it (Couper-Kuhlen, chapter 6), and about the uses of a particular type of response cry
capable of conveying ambiguous emotional stance (Hakulinen and Sorjonen, chapter 7).

Question 2: How does the expression of emotional stance contribute to the organization of
action sequences?
The contributions to the collection show that rather than being a contingent feature
of interaction that occasionally occurs along with otherwise nonemotional actions,
emotion is pervasively present in social action, oriented to and managed by the partici-
pants. The observations presented in many contributions are tied to particular actions
and/or activities. The chapters do not address expressions of emotion in general, but
they show how displays of emotion emerge as integral parts of the organization of par-
ticular social actions. The actions involve for example responses to requests (Wootton,
chapter 3) and directives (Goodwin and her colleagues, chapter 2) in adultchild inter-
action, as well as telling of stories or news (Couper-Kuhlen, chapter 6; Maynard and
Freese, chapter 5; Perkyl and Ruusuvuori, chapter 4) in interactions between adults.
In some cases, we might suggest that emotion displays contribute to the very formation
and recognition of the particular actions (cf. Schegloff, 2007, pp. 712), rather than
being a contingent element in them: for example, a complaint story is hardly conceiv-
able without emotion displays. The relation between emotion and action is articulated
in a somewhat different way in contributions by Hepburn and Potter (chapter 9), and
Heath and his colleagues (chapter 10): in these two chapters, a distinct display of emo-
tion (crying or display of surprise) in itself constitutes a first action which makes rele-
vant a particular second action by the coparticipant: a display of sympathy or empathy
in response to crying, or attending to the surprisable object in response to a display of
surprise. In these cases, arguably, the display of emotion is not only a constitutive part
of an action, but rather, it is itself the action that makes a response relevant.

Question 3: How is emotion regulated and managed in institutional encounters?

The collection enhances understanding of variation in the institutional regulation of
emotion in modern society. It shows institutionally facilitated as well as restricted ways
of expressing and responding to emotion and elucidates the participants asymmetric

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 ( ) Emotion in Interaction

obligations and rights in this. The contributions take up four specific institutional set-
tings: helpline calls (Hepburn and Potter, chapter 9), art gallery (Heath and his colleagues,
chapter 10), psychotherapy (Voutilainen, chapter 11), and health visiting with mothers of
newborn babies (Heritage and Lindstrm, chapter 12). The institutional ramifications for
the management of emotion in these settings are rather different: while in helpline calls,
management of the callers distress (manifested for example through crying) is a major
task of the call-takers; in psychotherapy, professional empathizing with the clients emo-
tion is counterbalanced by professional responses that seek to interpret and even chal-
lenge the clients emotional experience. Arguably, the objects in the art gallery are
designed and displayed to afford emotional responses such as the ones described in chap-
ter 10 by Heath and his colleagues. Finally, in the case of health visiting analyzed by
Heritage and Lindstrm (chapter 12), the fact that the client felt that she did not have
appropriate emotions became a key issue that the professional sought to deal with, even-
tually through reciprocal self-disclosures. There is still a way to go before microinterac-
tional research can reach generalizations regarding the management of emotion in
institutional settings, comparable to the generalizations that have been reached for ex-
ample in comparative research on turn-taking or task orientation in institutional settings
(see Drew & Heritage, 1992b; Heritage & Clayman, 2010; for a more general sociological
view on emotions in organizations, see Sieben & Wettegren, 2010). In pursuing that di-
rection, comparisons between the shape and the interactional management of specific
emotional displays in institutional and noninstitutional settings will possibly prove to be
of great importancean avenue of analysis started in chapter 9 by Hepburn and Potter.

Question 4: How does research on emotion contribute to existing theories regarding

language and social interaction?
All contributions to this collection demonstrate that rather than being a sec-
ondary function of language, affective and emotional meaning is central for under-
standing the use of language in social interaction. The chapters show that emotion is
constructed and interpreted by reference to specific sequential positions in interac-
tion, through the concomitant use of different kinds of resources. The importance of
the sequential organization of action in interpreting the affectivity and affiliative
character of verbal language is shown for example in the examination of an affec-
tively open response type (Hakulinen and Sorjonen, chapter 7) and of the impact of
a subsequent verbal reinforcement on the affiliative strength of response cries and
sound objects (Couper-Kuhlen, chapter 6). The need to take into account the vocal
displays of affect and affiliation in investigating verbal displays is shown in several
chapters of the volume (Goodwin and her colleagues, chapter 2; Maynard and Freese,
chapter 5; Couper-Kuhlen, chapter 6). In chapter 6 on affiliative and nonaffiliative
responses to complaint stories, Couper-Kuhlen shows that while these two types of
responses are typically fitted or nonfitted both verbally and prosodically to the tell-
ers prior talk, the picture is not so simple: in the case of verbally ambivalent response
the role of prosody is central, while some verbal responses come off as affiliative with-
out prosodic matching or upgrading of the tellers talk typical for affiliative responses.
Findings of this type lay the ground for the investigation of the relation between
verbal and vocal displays of emotion. Another kind of fine line between verbal and

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 EPILOGUE

vocal resources is brought up by Haakana in chapter 8, on fake laughter, also called

by the author lexicalized laughter, to indicate that the laugh tokens are articulated
more or less as lexical elements. A central relevance of analyzing nonvocal conduct,
for the expression of emotion and for understanding the affective import of verbal
expressions in face-to-face encounters, is shown in the chapters of the volume from
the point of body posture, facial expressions, and gaze (Goodwin and colleagues,
chapter 2; Heath and colleagues, chapter 10; Perkyl and Ruusuvuori, chapter 4;
Wootton, chapter 3).
Each chapter in its own way contributes to a better understanding and a more
focused exploration of emotion in conversation analysis and other lines of interac-
tionally oriented research: these studies make visible various facets of the partici-
pants perhaps ubiquitous orientation to each others emotional state in social
encounters. To understand the importance of this orientation, Tomasellos (2008)
recent outline of the three basic communicative motives in humans is helpful.
Based on developmental and evolutionary research, Tomasello suggests that human
communication is driven by motivations of requesting, informing, and sharing. Much
of classical and current microinteractional research has dealt with actions falling
under the first two motives: requesting motivation encompassing all ways in which
interactants make each other do something, and informing motivation encompass-
ing ways in which they tell each other things about the world and themselves, and in
so doing, orient to each others epistemic positions and statuses. Sharing, for Toma-
sello, involves I want you to feel something so that we can share attitudes / feelings
together (2008, p. 87, italics in original). The studies presented in this volume have
demonstrated the viability of the realm of phenomena pertaining to this third com-
municative motivation as a topic for research on language and social interaction.
Now that we have highlighted some of the research results presented in this col-
lection, it is time to turn to the discussion on the wider implications of these results.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION IN INDIVIDUALS

This book offers a selection of state-of-the-art studies specifying ways in which humans
in interaction display emotions, how they understand and respond to each others emo-
tional displays, and how these displays arise from, and contribute to, the actions that
they are involved in. To contextualize the results of these studies, we will outline some
key features of the study of emotion in psychology, sociology, and evolutionary theory,
where emotion has become a major research field during the past two decades. How-
ever, we do not have any unified social-psychological theory of emotion. What we do
have instead are various, partially overlapping and partially conflicting, conceptualiza-
tions of emotional phenomena. In what follows, we will outline some of these concep-
tualizations, foregrounding those for which the studies of this book have implications.
We will start from psychological theories dealing with emotions in individuals.
A rather widely accepted psychological view considers emotions as consisting of
two dimensions: valence and arousal (Larsen & Diener, 1992). Valence refers to the
basic quality of the emotion, that is, whether it is positive or negative (pleasant or

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unpleasant). Arousal, on the other hand, refers to the intensity of the emotion on a
scale between strong and weak. Positive and negative emotions can involve either a
strong or weak arousal component. However, valence and arousal are not unrelated:
extremely positive or extremely negative emotions tend to be intensive as well. In
cognitive neuroscience and related research, the valence and arousal components of
emotion have been shown to be organized differently in the human body: valence is
related for example to the lateralization of the brain (see Harmon-Jones, 2003),
while arousal is associated with the activation of the autonomous nervous system.
The breaking-down of emotions into components of valence and arousal arises
from the investigation of individual experience and psychophysiology. Therefore, one
might think that the distinction is not relevant in the study of social interaction.
However, phenomena related to valence and arousal come up in the study of emotion
in interaction: chapters in this volume show that in displaying and negotiating their
emotional stances, participants to interaction orient to both the valence and the in-
tensity of their displays. Thus, Maynard and Freese show in chapter 5 that it is an
interactional task of the teller and the recipient of the news to establish, in real time,
the valence of the events-in-the-world that they report as good or bad. This involves,
as they put it, collaborative, concerted action and interaction As explicated in their
chapter, the prosodic features of the delivery and the response are among key
resources in this coconstruction. In interaction, valence of emotion can also be left
unspecifiedbut as Hakulinen and Sorjonen show in chapter 7, this equivocality is
in itself an interactional achievement. They examine a particular response cry in
Finnish, voi ett, which is apt for dealing with ambiguity of emotional valence.
Arousalthe intensity of emotion displaysis also oriented to by the partici-
pants. Chapters 4 and 6, by Perkyl and Ruusuvuori, and by Couper-Kuhlen, among
others, show cases where the intensity of the emotional display by a recipient of a
story or announcement is treated as insufficient, as indexed by the efforts of the first
speaker to elicit a stronger response from the recipient. In these cases, the partici-
pants are interactionally alive to the question of the (sufficiency of the) intensity of
the display. In sum, studies in this volume suggest that participants in interaction
monitor the valence of each others emotional displays and the degree of arousal
involved in them. Perhaps in most cases, this monitoring secures a relative attune-
ment in emotional displays.
Alongside the conceptualization of the dimensions of emotion, another rather
widely accepted (but not uncontested) distinction in psychological emotion research is
the one between basic emotions and other emotional phenomena. Basic emotions are
thought be recognizable across cultures. They consist of rather short-lived experi-
ences, and they involve distinct physiological and experiential features, as well as
specific facial expression. Basic emotions include joy, sorrow, fear, anger, surprise, and
disgust (Matsumoto & Ekman, 2009). Basic emotions are thought to be evolutionarily
continuous and grounded on fundamental and universal adaptive mechanisms based
on affect programmes (Scherer, 2009). Other emotional phenomenavariously
referred to as secondary, tertiary, or social emotionsinvolve more complex
emotions, which may be blends of the basic emotions, and which are often anchored
to culture-specific norms and rules. Social emotions, for example, are said to include

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 EPILOGUE

shame, embarrasment, jealousy, admiration, guilt, gratitude, schadenfreude, and pity

(Hareli & Parkinson, 2009).
Judging from the existing interaction research on emotions, including the chapters
of this volume, pure forms of basic emotions are not very often found in naturally oc-
curring interaction. Instead, what we encounter are blended and complex expressions.
The chapters in this collection conceptualize their target emotions in rather various
waysreflecting the variability and complexity of naturally occurring emotional phe-
nomena. Coming perhaps closest to basic emotions are the contributions by Goodwin
and her colleagues (chapter 2), and Heath and his colleagues (chapter 10). The opening
section of the former deals with displays of disgust, while the latter focuses on surprise
as interactionally occasioned event. Both chapters show clearly the similarities between
the facial expression they examine and the paradigmatic facial expressions of disgust
and surprise, respectively, explicated by Darwin (1872/1998) and Ekman and Friesen
(1975/2003). However, the authors also point out their difference from the basic emo-
tion concept. Heath and colleagues emphasize that the expression of surprise in their
data does not take place on its own, but intertwines with other emotions (such as awe
and enjoyment). Goodwin and colleagues, on the other hand, approach the display of
disgust not as an expression of the inner state of the individual (an avenue taken in the
basic-emotions line of research), but as a multimodal practice that locates its target in
the local geography of the interaction, and encompasses not only face but posture,
prosody, and lexis as well. As for the rest of the chapters in this volume, they deal with
complex emotional expressions (such as distressed behavior analyzed by Wootton,
fake laughter analyzed by Haakana, or indignation analyzed by Couper-Kuhlen) and/or
specific ineractional ramifications that accompany displays of various emotions. These
expressions involve seemingly endless variation and mixture of emotion. The collection
suggests that in everyday encounters the participants do most of their emotion work
with these variable and blended emotions.
In everyday parlance, emotion is often used more or less as a synonym for feeling.
Emotion is then understood as a subjective experience, something that the subject is
aware of. Psychological conceptualization goes, however, beyond mere subjective
awareness of feeling. Emotion is also understood to involve other facets, including
physiological, cognitive, and expressive processes, as well as action tendencies (Scherer,
1996, p. 284). Much of the psychological theorizing on emotions has involved debate
on the relations between these facets. We will review each facet, showing linkages to
the contributions of the current collectionstarting with the facets that are most
directly linked to social interaction.
Expression is the facet of emotion that the contributions of this collection are most
intimately linked to. The expressive aspects of emotion are understood as involving
facial, vocal or other practices which embody, and/or convey to the environment, the
emotional state of the subject. Charles Darwins The expression of emotion in man and
animals (1872/1998) is a classic of the field, suggesting among other things that some
key emotions are associated with biologically rooted, universal facial expression in
humans, and that these expressions have evolutionary precedents in other species.
The most influential follower of this line of research is Paul Ekman, whose studies
have offered empirical evidence for the universality of the facial expressions of joy,

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 ( ) Emotion in Interaction

sadness, anger, astonishment, and fear, and who has also suggested that the facial
expression of emotion is regulated by culture-specific display rules (Ekman & Friesen,
1969). The vocal expression of emotion is of no less importance. Psychological research
on vocal expression of emotion has during the past decades specified the acoustic
patterns that subjects in experimental settings associate with different emotions, and
showed differences in the accuracy of acoustically based emotion recognition (e.g.,
showing that sadness and anger are recognized more accurately than disgust and joy)
(see Scherer, 2003; Goudbeek & Scherer, 2009).
In most psychological research, expressive behaviors are understood as readouts
of the subjects underlying emotional state. However, Darwin was the first to bring to
attention the other side of the coin, by pointing out that the expressions are also in
the service of social interaction. Expression of anger, for example, regulates social
interaction, and it may be more beneficial for the animal or human subject to display
readiness to fight through anger expression than to get engaged in fight itself, as the
fight may have grave physical and social consequences (see Chevalier-Skolnikoff,
1973/2003, p. 28). Such interaction-centered understanding of facial expression has
been further developed by Fridlund (1994), whose behavioral ecology view suggests
that facial displays are social signals, communicating behavioral intentions or social
motives, and that they do not necessarily have linkages to underlying psychosomatic
affective states. Another articulation of the relation between expression and under-
lying affective state has been proposed in the so-called facial feedback hypothesis,
according to which emotion expression (particularly face) can enhance or create
feeling states as well as physiological responses associated with emotion (see Kappas,
2008). If we intentionally smileeven if we hold a pencil in our mouth in a traverse
position which forces a kind of smiling expression to our facewe get happier.
This collection is very much about the social organization of expression of emotion:
the vocal (see, for example, the chapters by Couper-Kuhlen, Goodwin and colleagues,
Hepburn and Potter, Maynard and Freese, and Haakana) and facial expressions (see for
example, the chapters by Goodwin and colleagues, Heath and colleagues, and Perkyl
and Ruusuvuori), as well as body postures (Goodwin and colleagues). Alongside these
modalities of emotion expression, the chapters of this collection also examine the rich
grammatical (lexicosyntactic) resources that participants to interaction use in display-
ing their emotions (see especially the chapters by Couper-Kuhlen, and Hakulinen and
Sorjonen)something that most psychological theories of emotion only touch upon
or do not deal with at all. In all contributions, the vocal or visual emotion displays are
examined in the context of the unfolding of the verbal content of the utterances in
question. The contributions suggest, therefore, that in everyday interactions, display
and recognition of emotion are the result of the simultaneous use of various resources
of expression which, as Goodwin and her colleagues (chapter 2) put it, mutually elab-
orate each other. In investigating emotional expressions as communicative moves
(see also Bavelas & Chovil, 2000) that arise from and contribute to the moment-
by-moment unfolding of interactive situations, the contributions in the volume res-
onate with the interaction-centered understanding of expressions, put forward (in
the context of facial expressions) by Fridlund (1994). The contributions enrich this
line of research by explicating the communicative uses of emotional expressions

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 EPILOGUE

in the matrix of the sequential organization of actions and activities, be they news
deliveries, complaint stories, parental directives, and so on.
Even though this collection focuses on expression, the findings of the chapters
speak also to other facets of emotion. One of them involves action tendencies. In the
psychology of emotions, action tendencies refer to the human (or animal) disposi-
tion to act when in an emotional state. Motivation for action is a key component of
emotion (Frijda, 2004). A typical action tendency is to fight when angry, and to run
away when afraid. According to appraisal theorists (see below), the action tendency
arises from an evaluation of the situation that the subject is in: it involves physiolog-
ical and psychological preparedness to execute a particular action as a way to cope
with the situation (see Zhu & Thagard, 2002). The studies in this collection elucidate
the association between emotion and action from a particular point of view. Rather
than discussing tendencies to act that would be inherently associated with particular
emotions or emotional appraisals, the contributions to this collection show interac-
tionally constructed trajectories of action, in the production of which emotion plays
a central part. Just to give one example, Maynard and Freese (chapter 5) show how
the delivery and reception of news involve emotion displays through prosody and
lexical choice (word selection). Thus, the contributions to this collection do not
approach action as a tendency that arises from the emotion. Instead, they approach
action and emotion as inherently intertwined, showing trajectories of action the
production of which at least customarily, if not necessarily, involves an interplay of
emotion displays by the participants of the action.
The cognitive aspects of emotion involve what is commonly called appraisal. Ap-
praisal theories (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Scherer, 2004) suggest that we evaluate
our environment in terms of the significance of its objects and events for our goals,
concerns, or wellbeing. Objects or events that have positive or negative consequences
for us arouse (positive or negative) emotional responses in us (physiological responses
as well as subjective feelings). Food or a caring partner incites positive emotions,
whereas a threatening mob in a dark street incites fear. The central methodology used
in the studies in this volume, conversation analysis, is not geared to describe cognitive
processes, and the place of cognition in understanding interaction is indeed subject
to debate (see e.g., Potter, 2006; Levinson, 2006a). The contributions to this volume
do, however, speak also to the conceptualizations of emotion that foreground the
appraisal processes. This is done perhaps most saliently by Wootton (chapter 3), who in
his chapter shows how a child of two to three years produces strongly distressed emo-
tional responses in situations where her parents breach the childs expectations or
understandings regarding an upcoming course of joint actionsexpectations that the
participants established a moment before in their interaction. The findings of Wootton
suggest a specification of the general tenets of appraisal theory: he showed that the
child he was studying evaluated her immediate interactional environment, not only in
terms of its affordances to her individual goals and concerns (for example by getting
distressed in response to parental rejections of requests), but also in terms of the match
between the actual courses of action and the locally established expectations. In a rather
different way, the findings of Perkyl and Ruusuvuori (chapter 4) are also linked to
appraisal processes. They show how the evaluation of conversational objects brought

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about through tellings proceeds moment by moment, the tellers sometimes revising the
initial evaluation through their facial expressions after the completion of the tellings.
Not all the facets of emotion described in psychological literature are directly
addressed by the studies in this volume. These include the physiological aspects of
emotion and the subjective experience of emotion. Over a hundred years ago, William
James and Carl Lange pointed out the importance of physiology of emotion (see
Dalgleish, 2009). They maintained that psychophysiological reactions in the body
that are associated with emotionsuch as cardiovascular activity, blood flow, respi-
ration, temperature, muscle tensionare not the consequence of subjective emo-
tional experience, but instead, these physiological events are direct responses to
perception of an arousing stimulus in the environment (such as a meeting a bear in a
forest, see James, 1884) and therefore precede the subjective experience of the
emotion. While the physiology of emotion remains a topic of intensive experimental
research (see e.g., Bradley & Lang, 2007), in the collection at hand, physiological
aspects of emotion are not directly addressed. Observational methods based on video
and audio recording (used by all authors of the collection) give access to the public
display of emotion, not the physiological processes. This does not mean, however,
that the phenomena described in these studies are completely separate from the
physiological aspects of emotion. Earlier research shows that vocal and facial expres-
sion of emotion is linked to physiological processes in the body: not only in the sense
that physiological changes result in changes in expression (see e.g., Scherer, 1989),
but also the other way round: that changes in expression may result in physiological
changes in the body (see e.g., Kappas, 2008). This suggests that there is a linkage
between the phenomena explored in this volumethe organization of the interac-
tional expression of emotionand psychophysiological processes, but their explica-
tion must be left to future studies. (For an effort in this direction, see Perkyl,
Voutilainen, Henttonen, Ravaja, & Sams, 2010).
Another facet of emotion not directly addressed in the studies presented in this
volume involves the subjective experience of emotion. Since James and Lange, the
place of subjective experience in emotion has been contested. Much of the current
psychology of emotions plays down rather than emphasizes the importance of expe-
rience in emotions. To a large extent processes related to emotions are automated
and nonconscious. Experimental research has repeatedly shown that the evaluation
of the objects and events in our environment, as well as the corresponding physiolog-
ical changes and even actions, initially take place outside our consciousness (Zajonc,
1980; Nummenmaa, 2010, pp. 3955). Despite its potentially great subjective signif-
icance, the experience of emotion can thus be considered a secondary stage in the
emotion process. This de-emphasis of conscious experience in emotion research res-
onates with some of the theoretical tenets of conversation analysis, which is the
methodology informing the studies of this collection: this method has traditionally
emphasized the nonconscious or automated character of the choices of action that
participants in interaction are involved in (see e.g., Sacks, 1992, vol. 1, p. 11), remain-
ing agnostic regarding the actors possible underlying experiences (Heritage,
1984a). Accordingly, the analytical focus of the studies presented is on the fine social
organization of emotion displays, not on the accompanying experiences. However,

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 EPILOGUE

the thoroughly interactional character of the phenomena examined in this collection

adds another twist to the question of subjective experience in emotion. Throughout
the contributions to this volume, the ways in which the interactants relate to each
others emotional states are in focus. So, in the studies of this volume, we are not
addressing individual subjects experiences of their own emotions, but rather, the
subjects possible experiences of the others emotion. All contributions to this volume
document interactions in which the visual, vocal, and verbal actions of the partici-
pants show their orientation to the others emotional state, as indicated in this
others expressions. We cannot say whether, or to what extent, these orientations
involve reading the subjective emotional experience of the other, but we can safely
say that they involve reading of the others actions as involving emotion.1 Therefore,
the question of significance of the experience of emotion becomes rearticulated in
the context of intersubjectivitybut further answers must await future studies.
During the recent decade or two, much psychological research has revolved around
the regulation of emotion (see e.g., Gross, 2007; Vandekerckhove, von Scheve, Ismer,
Jung, & Kronast, 2008). In psychology, regulation of emotions is conceived as an
individual competence, and as the process by which individuals influence which emo-
tions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emo-
tions (Gross, 1998, p. 275). According to Gross and Thompson (2007, pp. 1016)
emotion regulation strategies involve the selection and modification of the situation
that might arouse emotion, deployment of attention in a given situation, changes in the
ways in which the situation is appraised, and modulation of the physiological, experien-
tial, or behavioral response to the situation. The capacity of emotion regulation evolves
through the maturation process of the individual (e.g., Thompson & Meyer, 2007).
The chapters in this collection offer a distinct perspective to regulation of emotion.
Rather than considering the regulation as an individual capacity or as a process within
an individual, the papers in this collection show naturally occurring interactive pro-
cesses in which participants, in and through their interaction, create and regulate
(and sometimes fail to regulate) each others emotions. For example, Heath and his
colleagues (chapter 10) show instances in which visitors to art galleries and museums
direct their covisitors attention to emotionally relevant objects and thus, sometimes
successfully and sometimes less so, create situations where surprise or other emo-
tional reaction is relevant. Likewise, Couper-Kuhlen (chapter 6) shows processes in
which storytellers elicit (and again, sometimes fail to elicit) affiliative responses from
their recipients. In their contribution (chapter 4), Perkyl and Ruusuvuori suggest
that there exists a parallel between individual regulation of emotion and the processes
of interactional regulation: the former being anchored in the latter, both developmen-
tally and as a real-time process.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS AS SOCIAL PROCESSES

Above, we have contextualized the contributions of this volume to existing research

on emotion as a process within individuals. Emotion is, however, equally a social
process; and the social, rather than individual, aspects of emotion are indeed closer

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to this volume. In what follows, some facets of social psychology and the sociology of
emotions will be explored, again in order to contextualize the contribution of this
volume.
At its ontogenetic beginning, early in individual life, social interaction is suffused
by emotion.2 During the first year of life, before acquiring language, an infants vocal-
izations and other expressions serve as powerful means in conveying emotion: think
of a crying baby or of a smiling and laughing infant. In their responses to infants
expressions, caretakers orient to the emotion import of these expressions. For
example, by matching or mirroring the prosodic features of the infants expressions,
as well as her facial expressions and movements, the caretakers are understood to
recognize and regulate the infants emotional states (see Stern, 1985; Papouek &
Papouek, 1989; Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002, pp. 1549). Thus, arguably,
early in human life, social interaction is there for the regulation of emotion. The con-
tinuities and discontinuities between emotional interaction in early interaction and
in adulthood wait to be specified (Kahri, in preparation). Among the contributions to
this volume, matching of expressions in adult interaction is addressed explicitly in
chapter 6 by Couper-Kuhlen, who shows prosodic matching between the delivery and
the empathic reception of complaint storiesa practice originating in the preverbal
interactions between infants and caretakers. Contributions by Wootton (chapter 3),
and Goodwin and her colleagues (chapter 2), offer two glimpses from emotional
interaction at different junctures along the developmental path. Wootton shows dis-
tressed interactions between a two- to three-year-old child and her parents, and
Goodwin and others show emotional responses to parents directives in children
aged four to ten.
Emotional contagion is a social process involving the human tendency to catch
the emotions that others are experiencing. Already in the eighteenth century, philos-
opher Adam Smith suggested that mimicking the others expressive behavior is a key
mediator of emotional contagion. The contemporary view sees emotional contagion
as the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise expressions, vocalisations,
postures and movements with those of another persons and, consequently, to
converge emotionally (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993a, p. 96). There is a rich
tradition of experimental research tracing aspects of this mimicry in facial expres-
sions, prosody, and body movements (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993b).
Recently, the neural basis of emotional contagion has been explored, especially in
studies on mirror-neuron systems (Iacoboni, 2008). The theory of emotional conta-
gion suggests that behavioral mimicry affects the emotional experience of the person
who is mimicking the other (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993a, pp. 978), and
thereby the subjects end up sharing an emotion. The evolutionary origins of emotional
contagion are thought to be in the benefits that rapid adoption of others emotions
brings to an individual for example in situations of sudden danger, such as a predator
attack (see e.g., Nummenmaa, 2010, p. 145). Emotional contagion is also a key mecha-
nism in group formation: being part of group often involves sharing the emotions of
the other group members (Collins, 2004; Sy Sy, Ct, & Saavedra, 2005).
Processes parallel to emotional contagion are dealt with in several contributions
to this volume. Perhaps most directly, contagious processes were observed by

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Couper-Kuhlen, and Maynard and Freese, in their respective studies on complaint

stories and news deliveries: the recipients of stories of news tend to adopt key
features of the vocal expressive behaviors of the tellers, and in consequence, a shared
emotion is achieved. Importantly, however, the emotional contagion observed in
these studies was regulated by the sequential organization of interaction: the recipi-
ents of complaint stories and news deliveries produced their emotional responses
largely at the completion of the news delivery or narrative, rather than immediately
after the tellers emotional displays. The studies in this volume also show instances
of limits to straightforward emotional contagion. Perhaps expectedly, the negative
emotional displays of children studied by Wootton, and Goodwin and her colleagues
are not directly reciprocated by their parents, but dealt with and regulated by
responses that are emotional but do not involve direct sharing of the childs emotion.
Heath and his colleagues offer an intriguing case that specifies a process of conta-
gion, in their study on the organization of surprise at unexpected features in the
environment. First, they show that the vocal, facial, and postural expression of
surprise is sensitive to the presence and conduct of others, designed to encourage ...
the coparticipant to discover ... the surprisable (p. 231 ). What they examine, thus,
is not an individual emotion that is then caught by a coparticipant, but it is an emo-
tion that from the outset is designed to be attended to by the others present. On the
other hand, Heath and his colleagues show that, in the case of surprise, what the
other party actually catches is not quite the same emotion that the first party has
displayed: the recipient typically does not reproduce the surprise but turns his or her
attention to the surprisable, and in so doing legitimates the first partys surprise, and
possibly shares the secondary emotion, such as amusement, accompanying the
surprise. Thus, the studies presented in this volume suggest that the process of emo-
tional contagion in naturally occurring interaction can be much more complex than
a straightforward spreading of a given emotion from one subject to another.
What Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983) calls emotion work is an aspect of social
processes pertaining to emotion. Emotion work involves the individuals making
their emotions comply with the norms and expectations (feeling rules) of their
society, by evoking, shaping, or suppressing their feelings (Hochschild, 1979, p. 561).
Individuals control not only their emotional expressions, but also their physiological
state (e.g., by trying to calm themselves down through breathing exercises), as well as
the very experience of emotion. Different social positions (class, profession) entail
different feeling rules and corresponding emotion work; Hochschilds work on the
emotion work of flight attendants, evoking positive emotions (Hochschild 1983), is
particularly illustrative.
In a way, all contributions to this volume illustrate practices of emotion work. As
Maynard and Freese point out (chapter 5), their study explicates the moment-
by-moment interactional processes, the end result of which is an emotional display
that complies with the feeling rules relevant to the situation. The same also applies to
other studies in the volume. When it comes to the forms of emotion work that are tied
to particular social positions, chapters 11 and 12, by Voutilainen, and Heritage and
Lindstrm, are of particular importance, as they show practices by two types of pro-
fessional (psychotherapist and health visitor) that work with their clients emotional

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 ( ) Emotion in Interaction

experience. Emotional labor in these cases involves different forms of empathy. Her-
itage and Lindstrms chapter also brings to the foreground the normative aspects of
emotional labor, as they present a case study of professionalclient interaction in
which the clients primary problem is her lack of maternal feelings, which she con-
siders unnatural. By showing the interactional practices involved in emotion work
in everyday or professional settings, the studies of this volume also offer a specifica-
tion of the concept of emotion work: they illustrate that feeling rules of society do
not influence individuals directly but rather in and through the interactional prac-
tices through which the emotional displays are shaped moment by moment.
Social constructionism is a multifaceted methodological and theoretical approach
to the study of social and psychological phenomena (see e.g., Berger & Luckmann,
1966; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), with important implications for the study of emo-
tions (see Sandlund, 2004, pp. 6570). There are many variants of constructionism;
for the study of emotion, discursive psychology (Edwards, 2005; Potter, 2006) is of
particular importance. A central tenet in social constructionist (or discursive psycho-
logical) investigation of emotion is to call into question the distinction between the
inner experience and the outer expression. Constructionists point out that in lay
thinking, as well as in much psychological and sociological theorizing, emotions are
understood as primarily inner processes which have consequences for outer expres-
sions. In contrast, constructionist theorizing of emotions considers them as thoroughly
public phenomena: something that is constructed, and oriented to, in interaction
(Potter, 2006, p. 132). Emotions are done, they are public actions (Gergen, 1999). More-
over, references to emotions are a powerful resource in accounting for actions, and they
are also accounted for in discourse (Coulter, 1989; Edwards, 1997); it is the task of social
scientists to explicate these accounting practices. Whether emotions as constructions
have something to do with the inner experiences of psychophysiological processes or
not is something about which constructionist researchers remain (at best) agnostic.
The chapters of this volume resonate with and differently contribute to the con-
structionist study of emotion. Maynard and Freese explicate their indebtedness to
constructionist thinking. Their chapter lays out practices through which emotions
are done though public actions in social interaction. In a particular way, Haakanas
chapter on fake laughter addresses the constructionist critique regarding the dis-
tinction between inner and the outer aspects of emotion. Fake laughter involves
sounds that are conventionally associated with laughter, produced in a way that
makes it clear that the laughter is not to be interpreted as being real (p. 176). As
Haakana shows, through fake laughter, speakers show that an emotion display would
be relevant at that point in interaction (for example, after a joke or in a delicate
situation), but they distance themselves from that very emotion. One might say that
fake laughter is a practice in which interactants make use of the lay distinction
between inner experience and outer expression: they produce a display of emotion
that is observably not indicative of the inner state usually associated to similar kinds
of displays.
It may very well be that the interactants in chapters other than Haakanas treated
each others expressions in the lay way, as expressions of an inner emotional state.
In other words, they possibly treated each others lexical choices, prosody, facial

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expressions, and the like as indicative of an inner emotion. Regardless of whether

or not we as researchers share that distinction, the evidence put forward in the chap-
ters of this volume demonstrates that these displays were methodologically produced,
employing intersubjectively valid means of expression, occurring in circumscribed
sequential locations, and having definite sequential consequences.
While the constructionist view methodologically brackets the inner dimension of
emotion and focuses solely on the public displays, there are other conceptual formu-
lations that seek to integrate the inner and the outer in ways that still allow for
the thoroughly social and methodic character of emotion displays. As Perkyl
and Ruusuvuori suggest in chapter 4, one such avenue arises from recent infant
caretaker interaction research, where researchers have suggested that there is an
intimate connection between what they call self-regulation of emotion and the in-
teraction regulation (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002, p. 22). According to this view, the
same behaviors that entail interactional emotion displays, also serve for self-regula-
tion, and for that reason, interactional regulation and self-regulation comprise a system.
Another conceptual formulation comes from a quite different direction and seeks to
eradicate the distinction between the outer and the inner. Such a position is expli-
cated in the phenomenological philosophy. The radically intersubjectivist philosophy
of Merleau-Ponty (1964a, 1964b; Zahavi, 2011) suggests that our emotions exist in
our face and in our gestures, and are not hidden behind them (Zahavi, 2011, p. 4).
This does not mean to deny the reality of the subjective experience of emotions, but
to maintain that experience and expression are one, and that the experience is acces-
sible to the other in the expression (and not through inferences based on the expres-
sion). A comparable position was taken by American pragmatist philosophers as
discussed in chapter 5 by Maynard and Freese (see also Emirbayer & Maynard, 2011):
pragmatists such as Dewey and James sought to avoid the bifurcation of internal and
external or mind and body and instead to convey the seamlessness of affective expe-
rience and the displays by which it is realized for coparticipants (p. 110).
To sum up, the chapters in this volume explicate processes of doing or construct-
ing emotions, and thereby contribute to the constructionist research program on
emotions. Yet on the other hand, some of the chapters seek to find new, we might say
postconstructionist, ways of conceptualizing the experiential and expressive, or
inner and outer, aspects of emotion. This reconceptualization is in its infancy and
calls for future work.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS AND

EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES

The evolutionary perspective seeks to describe and categorize emotions in terms of

the evolutionary processes that brought them into existence. The evolutionary
understanding of emotion was recently encapsulated by Nesse (2009a, p. 160):
Emotions are specialized states, shaped in natural selection, that adjust many
aspects of an individual in ways that increase the ability to succeed in situations that
have posed consistent adaptive challenges over evolutionary time. Thus, emotions

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 ( ) Emotion in Interaction

are there because the physiological changes, expressions, action tendencies, and
other aspects of particular emotions have been helpful in dealing with particular
recurrent situations that our ancestors have faced. Or, in Nesses words, [e]motions
exist because they offered advantages in situations that recurrently influenced
survival and reproduction over evolutionary time (Nesse 2009a, p. 160).
Turner (2000; see also Turner & Stets, 2005, pp. 26183) has suggested a partic-
ular sociological reading of what some of the demands of recurrent situations might
have been in the evolutionary time when the emotional dispositions of humans were
formed. The point of departure for Turners argument is an empirically grounded
assumption that the emotional repertoire of humans is more varied than that of
other animals: apart from the evolutionarily continuous basic emotions, humans are
disposed to a wide variety of blended and complex emotions which they learn through
socialization. Turner suggests that the inclination to these varied emotions has
enhanced social bonds between individuals. Thus, for example, guilt and shame
enhance self-monitoring and corrective behaviors in individuals and thereby link
them to the social group, while gratitude and pride enhance bonding in a positive
way. The expansion of the emotional repertoire in our ancestors went hand in hand
with the evolution of the ability to attune to and read the others emotional responses
(cf. Enfield & Levinson, 2006), which also, according to Turner, enabled the individ-
uals capacity to develop stronger, more nuanced, and more flexible bonds of social
solidarity (Turner & Stets, 2005, p. 270).
The contributions to this volume focus on the interactional mechanisms of
emotions, rather than trying to explain how these mechanisms came into being in
evolution, or how they serve the fitness of individuals (cf. Tinbergen, 1963; Nesse,
2009b). Focusing on mechanisms (rather than on their origins) is indeed the stan-
dard methodological choice in conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and
related fields on which the studies of this collection are based (see however the recent
work by Enfield and Levinson, 2006). The current studies are not, however, irrele-
vant regarding evolutionary perspectives on emotion. They specify the phenomena
(or in Tinbergens [1963] terms, the mechanisms) the evolutionary origins of which
need to be explained.
The discussion in this chapter has sought to explicate some of the ways in which
the contributions to this volume have specified the existing understanding of inter-
actional mechanisms of emotion. Thus, the contributions have described naturally
occurring emotions that are not primarily preprogrammed individual responses to
environmental changes beyond the control of the responding individualsuch as is
the classic situation described by William James (1884) of a human subject unex-
pectedly meeting a bear in a forest. These contributions have shown emotions as
socially constructed phenomena occurring in the sequential time of human social
action and interaction, involving expressions that are responsive to the expressions
of cointeractants and designed for these cointeractants to perceive and to respond to.
The contributions have cast light on a number of emotional mechanisms in human
social interaction, such as the elicitation of emotional response in the other, the
attunement of ones emotional expression to that of the other, and the timing of ones
expressions in the context of the sequential progression of interaction. Furthermore,

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 EPILOGUE

the contributions have explicated mechanisms pertaining to the coordinated use of

multimodal resources in the production of emotion displays, to the regulation and
display of the actors commitment to his or her emotional expression, and to the
construction and display of appraisal of social situations that justify emotional
responses.
It is a challenge for future research to specify to what degree these mechanisms are
universal or culturally variable (cf. Wierzbicka ,1999), how they evolve in individual
development, and to consider them in an evolutionary context. In doing so, one has
to bear in mind what Nesse (2009a, p. 160) points out: not every aspect of emotional
state or expression is useful in Darwinian terms. It may very well be that the subtle
mechanisms of emotion expression and regulation examined in this volume are,
in evolutionary terms, epiphenomenal, that is, secondary phenomena occurring in
parallel to, or derivative from, core emotional processes which only are functional
in evolutionary terms. The evolutionary core of emotion might then involve, for
example, individual responses to unexpected encounters with threatening, disgusting,
or satisfying objects. However, it is reasonable to think that social encounters (as well
as encounters between humans and bears) are among the recurrent situations in
which emotions offer advantages for survival and reproduction. Therefore, the subtle
other-oriented expressions, responses, and perceptions explicated in this volume may
be crucial for cooperation and bonding, and therefore also, they may be among the
mechanisms that have been useful for survival and reproduction in evolutionary time.

NOTES

1. Applying freely the concepts introduced by Tulving (1984), it is important to make a

distinction between what might be called autobiographical emotional experience
the emotionally relevant memories and knowledge about past and current events that
a participant of interaction may be referring to in talkand what might be called
procedural emotional experience, that is, momentary emotional stance embodied in
the persons expressions. The recipients access to the former is restricted in various
ways (see especially Heritage, 2011) whereas the latter is much more directly observ-
able to the recipient. The distinction becomes particularly clear in the contribution
by Hepburn and Potter (chapter 9): while the recipient of crying might not know
exactly why the cointeractant is crying (autobiographical emotional experience), he or
she can directly observe that the cointeractant is in an emotional state (procedural
emotional experience).
2. I wish to thank Mikko Kahri for invaluable help with the literature on infantcaretaker
interaction.

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