Emotions in action: telephone-mediated dispute resolution.

Area of Science:

• Discursive Psychology
• Conversation Analysis
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Emotions are integral to human interaction but their display and management in institutional settings remain under-examined.
• Understanding emotion in talk-in-interaction requires rigorous analytical methods.
• Dispute resolution services involve high emotional stakes for consumers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how emotions are visibly expressed and responded to within a specific institutional context.
• To provide a rigorous account of emotion as it appears in talk-in-interaction.
• To analyze the temporal unfolding of emotional expression and response in calls.

Main Methods:

• Utilized conversation analysis (CA) to examine recordings and transcriptions of calls to a consumer dispute resolution service.
• Focused on the sequential organization of emotion within turns of talk and across the interaction.
• Analyzed callers' practices for describing and performing upset, and call-takers' responses.

Main Results:

• Callers systematically employed specific practices to express upset.
• Call-takers predominantly focused on institutionally relevant issues, rarely displaying or endorsing caller emotions.
• Unacknowledged emotionality in callers often led to escalation, while emotional affiliation typically occurred at call closing.

Conclusions:

• Emotion in institutional talk possesses a sequential property, with escalation occurring in the absence of endorsement.
• Emotional affiliation at call closing suggests a distinct function for emotion management at interactional boundaries.
• Findings highlight the importance of considering the sequential and interactional dynamics of emotion in service encounters.