Talking Feelings: The Collaborative Construction of Emotion in Talk Between Close Relational Partners

Abstract

This article reports findings from recent investigations into emotional talk between close relational partners. These findings are based upon 44 half‐hour videotaped and transcribed conversations of interactants discussing an emotionally influential issue. It was found that interactants' emotional experiences were interactively constructed through (1) downgrading and upgrading emotional expressions, and (2) developing characteristics of the situation seen to have produced the emotion so as to justify it. These collaborative constructions of emotional experience were found to be guided by a complicated system of constraints which takes into account both the great utility of emotional attributions in the construction of selves and relationships and their likelihood of survival in the interactional environment. Face‐to‐face interaction with close relational partners was, therefore, seen to play a significant role in the social construction of human emotion.

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