The essential role that emotions play in social interaction has become a recent focus of investigation (Peräkylä & Sorjonen, 2012; Robles & Weatherall, 2021) and, more specifically, distress displays through emotional laden conduct such as crying have been receiving increasing attention in both everyday and institutional contexts (e.g., Antaki et al., 2015; Hepburn & Potter, 2012; Weatherall, 2021; Wootton, 2012). In this paper, we examine the sequential organization of distress displays within Emotion-focused Therapy (EFT; Greenberg, 2002), an institutional context in which upset is commonly and relevantly produced. We focus on how therapist's attentiveness to crying and co-occurring features of distress shifts the unfolding troubles telling towards the mutual attention of the in-the-moment emotion as an action to be modulated and more deeply explored. Drawing from a corpus of video-recorded EFT sessions, this article examines interactional sequences of client distress displays followed by therapist responses to the distress. We extend understanding of embodied actions clients display as both a collection of 'distress features' and as interactional resources therapists draw upon to facilitate therapeutic intervention. We report on two main findings. First, it was found that clients regularly drew from a number of vocal and non-vocal resources to display distress and that certain distress features tended to cluster together on a continuum of lower or higher intensities of upset displays. Second, we identified three therapist response types that oriented explicitly to clients' in-the-moment distress: Noticings; Emotional Immediacy Questions and Modulating Directives. Whereas the first two action types were found to draw attention to or topicalize the client's emotional display, the third type, by contrast, had a regulatory function, either sustaining or abating the intensity of the upset. Our findings are discussed in light of other studies that have examined distress displays in sequences of talk.
Bibliography
Antaki, C., Richardson, E., Stokoe, E., & Willott, S. (2015). Dealing with the distress of people with intellectual disabilities reporting sexual assault and rape. Discourse Studies, 17(4), 415–432.
Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings. American Psychological Association.
Hepburn, A., & Potter, J. (2012). Crying and crying responses. In A. Perakyla & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Emotion in Interaction(pp. 195–211). Oxford University Press.
Perakyla, A., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2012). Emotion in Interaction. Oxford University Press.
Robles, J. S., & Weatherall, A. (Eds.). (2021). How Emotions Are Made in Talk. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Weatherall, A. (2021). Displaying emotional control by how crying and talking are managed. In J. S. Robles & A. Weatherall (Eds.), How emotions are made in talk (pp. 77–98). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Wootton, A. J. (2012). Distress in adult-child interaction. In A. Perakyla & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Emotion in Interaction. Oxford University Press.
