How does emotion arise in everyday settings? How can it be studied in the real world? In this book, authors Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn offer their distinctive approach to the clinical study of emotion. Emotionography explores emotion as it happens in natural interactions, rather than through scales, experiments, or interviews. Emotion is live, consequential, and interactional, and it can be studied in a way that enables accuracy and offers improvements to clinical practice. The authors' detailed notation system, built on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, accurately captures every emotional nuance of an interaction. Step-by-step case examples show how crying and upset, laughter, and anger can be studied from an emotionographic perspective, as the authors elucidate the process of doing emotionographic research. This distinctive and dynamic approach demonstrates that the way we communicate our emotions to others impacts both how they respond emotionally to us and their subsequent actions. Through emotionography, psychologists and practitioners can improve their interactions with research subjects and clients and researchers can bring new analytic rigor to their work. The authors bring the study of emotion to life and offer new theoretical insights and new ways of recognizing emotion's impact in real-world settings.
Jonathan Potter, DPhil, is professor emeritus and dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Potter is an expert in the field of discourse studies, with a focus on how careful analyses of interaction can be a route to the understanding and sometimes even reworking of basic psychological questions. Throughout his research career, Dr. Potter has addressed fundamental issues of theory and method, and he has made substantial research contributions in the area of language and racism, the operation of helplines, and the role of cognition in communication. He is associate editor of the journal Theory & Psychology, and is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. Alexa Hepburn, PhD, is professor emerita of communication at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She has published widely on the science of human interaction, as well as on developments in discursive and critical psychology. Dr. Hepburn's research focuses on the use and development of conversation analytic methods, including the notation and analysis of emotional expression within social interaction; the interactional role of interrogatives such as tag questions; parents' strategies for managing their children's behavior; and the empirical grounding of these interests in everyday interaction. Her work highlights limitations in more traditional perspectives on emotion and influence, and supports applied work in professional client encounters including medical consultations, and helpline interactions. Dr. Hepburn also continues to develop and deliver training workshops to practitioners.
Chapter One. Introducing Emotionography Chapter Two. Interactional Foundations Chapter Three. Crying Chapter Four. Laughter Chapter Five. Anger Chapter Six. Principles and Practices of Emotionographic Research Chapter Seven. Theory, Application, and New Horizons Appendix One . Transcription Notation Appendix Two. Selected Glossary of Technical Terms References
