Emotionography - A Public Lecture with Distinguished Professor Jonathan Potter and Professor Alexa Hepburn

Emotionography: A method for researching emotion and family interaction.
Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter,
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University

In this talk, we build on and develop contemporary interaction research on children and emotion.  Emotion is a central part of social life, but its systematic study has raised important and largely unresolved challenges for both quantitative and qualitative researchers in psychology and the social sciences. Emotion has become a topic in discursive psychology and conversation analysis, but with notable exceptions, has been somewhat at the margins of studies of interaction, often treated simply as a way of displaying a speaker’s stance. Emotionography brings emotion to center stage in interaction research. It is designed as an approach that rejects the vertical project of traditional studies of emotion that attempt to look inside the individual for feelings, affect, or body and brain systems using scales, experiments, brain scanners or qualitative interviews, all underpinned by a perceptual cognitive meta-theory. The emotionographic alternative offers a horizontal project that considers emotion in terms of the displays, reception, avowals, and attributions that are live in interaction. It also considers emotion across varied settings where display and uptake may work in the service of, and present challenges for, the institutional projects of helplines, family mealtimes, relationship disputes, and so on. Building on a longstanding critique, it rejects the use of traditional qualitative and quantitative methods and instead works purposefully with naturalistic records of interaction.

This talk is designed to illustrate the power of emotionography with examples taken from family mealtimes and relationship disputes involving children, and to highlight its radically contrasting vision of emotion in social life. Our focus will be on how features of conduct often glossed as anger, upset, and shame, play a part in parents’ attempts to guide their children’s future conduct. We show how emotion categories, descriptions, and displays are coordinated together as participants pursue different and sometimes conflicting tasks. The developing project of emotionography aims to map the way such emotions are understandable as parts of practices, and the way these practices vary across different interactional settings. The asymmetries, competences and projects of parents and children provide a rich arena for exploring such issues.

References
Hepburn, A. (2004). Crying: Notes on description, transcription and interaction,
              Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37, 251-90.
Hepburn, A. & Potter, J. (2011). Threats: Power, family mealtimes and social influence,
              British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 99-120.
Hepburn, A., & Potter, J. (2023) Understanding Mixed Emotions in Organized Helping
              through Emotionography. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1236148.
Hepburn, A., & Potter, J. (2021). Essentials of conversation analysis. American
              Psychological Association.
Potter, J. & Hepburn, A. (forthcoming). Emotionography: A Method for Analyzing
              Emotion in Psychology and the Social Sciences. American Psychological
              Association Press.
Potter, J., & Hepburn, A. (2020). Shaming interrogatives: Admonishments, the social
              psychology of emotion, and discursive practices of behaviour modification in
              family mealtimes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 59(2), 347-364.


Alexa Hepburn is a Research Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, and Honorary Professor in the School of Social Science and Humanities at Loughborough University. She has published widely regarding methodological, practical, theoretical, and meta-theoretical frameworks in the social sciences, and on the use and development of conversation analytic methods, particularly regarding emotional expressions such as upset, anger, and laughter, parents’ strategies for managing children's behaviour, techniques for giving advice, and practitioners’ empathic responses in clinical encounters. A major focus is to develop new insights into profound issues related to emotion, socialization, and influence, and to develop innovative and effective applied research techniques for interaction research. This is reflected in her four books – An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology (2003), Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction (2007, edited with Sally Wiggins), Transcribing for Social Research (2017, with Galina Bolden) and Essentials of Conversation Analysis (2021, with Jonathan Potter). She has delivered over 40 invited seminars, plenaries, and keynotes, and over 30 specialist workshops on interaction analysis in 12 different countries around the world. She is currently working closely with video materials of family mealtimes, clinical encounters, and various types of telephone interaction, and developing book with Jonathan Potter: Emotionography: A Method for Analyzing Emotion in Psychology and the Social Sciences.

Jonathan Potter is Distinguished Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Honorary Professor in the School of Social Science and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. He has worked on basic theoretical and methodological issues in social science for more than 40 years. He has engaged with, and developed, post-structuralism (in Social Texts and Context, with Margaret Wetherell and Peter Stringer, 1984), discourse analysis (in Discourse and Social Psychology with Margaret Wetherell, 1987), discursive approaches to racism (in Mapping the Language of Racism, with Margaret Wetherell, 1992), discursive psychology (in Discursive Psychology, with Derek Edwards, 1992), and constructionism (systematically reworked in Representing Reality, 1996). Since then he coedited a collection on cognition in interaction research (Conversation and Cognition, with Hedwig te Molder, 2005) and coauthored an introduction to conversation analysis aimed at psychologists (Essentials of Conversation Analysis, with Alexa Hepburn, 2021). He is currently working on a book with Alexa Hepburn for American Psychological Association: Emotionography: A Method for Analyzing Emotion in Psychology and the Social Sciences.