# LIVED CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY: SHAREDNESS AND NORMATIVITY AS DISCURSIVE, EMBODIED AND AFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE WORLD IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

EDITED BY : Carolin Demuth, Pirkko Raudaskoski and Sanna Raudaskoski PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology

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# LIVED CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY: SHAREDNESS AND NORMATIVITY AS DISCURSIVE, EMBODIED AND AFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE WORLD IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

Topic Editors:

Carolin Demuth, Aalborg University, Department Communication & Psychology, Centre for Qualitative Studies, Denmark Pirkko Raudaskoski, Aalborg University, Department Communication & Psychology, Mattering: Centre for Discourse & Practice, Denmark Sanna Raudaskoski, Tampere University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Social Research, Finland

Salla Jarske

Citation: Demuth, C., Raudaskoski, P., Raudaskoski, S., eds. (2020). Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements with the World in Social Interaction. Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88963-690-7

# Table of Contents

*04 Editorial: Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements With the World in Social Interaction*

Carolin Demuth, Pirkko Raudaskoski and Sanna Raudaskoski


Karen Gainer Sirota


Akira Takada


Andrea Karsten and Marie-Cécile Bertau

*160 The Entanglements of Affect and Participation* Pirkko Raudaskoski and Charlotte Marie Bisgaard Klemmensen

# Editorial: Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements with the World in Social Interaction

#### Carolin Demuth<sup>1</sup> \*, Pirkko Raudaskoski <sup>2</sup> and Sanna Raudaskoski <sup>3</sup>

*<sup>1</sup> Department Communication & Psychology, Centre for Qualitative Studies, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, <sup>2</sup> Department Communication & Psychology, Mattering: Centre for Discourse & Practice, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, <sup>3</sup> Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Social Research, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland*

Keywords: culture, sharedness, normativity, discourse, embodiment, affect, social interaction

**Editorial on the Research Topic**

#### **Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements with the World in Social Interaction**

Edited and reviewed by: *Glenn Adams, University of Kansas, United States*

> \*Correspondence: *Carolin Demuth cdemuth@hum.aau.dk*

#### Specialty section:

*This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

Received: *10 December 2019* Accepted: *25 February 2020* Published: *11 March 2020*

#### Citation:

*Demuth C, Raudaskoski P and Raudaskoski S (2020) Editorial: Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements with the World in Social Interaction. Front. Psychol. 11:437. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00437* Understanding the cultural nature of human psychological functioning requires exploring the psychological means that bring about cultural forms of human conduct and experience. Cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are usually understood as being primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, it is rarely clear what exactly is to be understood as "sharedness" and "normativity" and what psychological means enable shared normativity. The Research Topic aims to contribute to a better understanding of these concepts by taking a closer look at discursive, embodied and affective engagements with the world.

Cultural psychologists agree that humans develop as participants in cultural communities (Rogoff, 2003) and that the way we perceive and understand the world is mediated through social interaction, primarily through semiotic sign systems such as language (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991; Valsiner, 2014). Social constructionists argue that is through discursive practices that we construct specific versions of social reality (Gergen, 1985; Harré, 2012). Language here is understood as an activity, as social practice including embodied and affective dimensions that go beyond mere verbal talk (Shotter, 2008; Bertau, 2014). Language practices ("languaging") and consciousness constitute each other (Vygotsky, 1978; Harré and Gillet, 1994; Linell, 2009) and constitute forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953). Slunecko and Hengl (2007) describe this as language "'owning' or 'having' us," arguing that humans are not simply beings who are disposed to language; rather, they are beings, who are acquired, modified, or formatted by language, and thus by their culture. (Geertz's, 1973) describes of "humans as animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun" and culture as the symbolic "fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their actions" (p. 145). Developing this idea further, Brockmeier (2012) argues that it is through language—particularly narrative—that we are weaving this symbolic fabric (p. 442).

Looking merely at discursive practices in terms of verbal talk, however, sidelines the relational-affective nature of languaging, as well as other embodied aspects of social interaction. As Goodwin (2000, 2013) has convincingly shown, discursive practices need to be understood as part of a complex, collective and cultural human activity composed also of bodies, material artifacts, and the space.

The contributions of this Research Topic aim to further develop these ideas and to shed light on the processes involved both in the sharedness of certain ways of understanding the world and the normative dimension of social life. These processes are conceived of as action based, mutually shaped, dynamic and fluid, ever evolving, and situated in ecologically embedded social interaction. With this Research Topic we also intend to go beyond mere theoretical discussions and to illustrate how shared normativity can be empirically studied.

Larrain and Haye develop a theoretical argument about human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming by laying out a discursive and aesthetic view that takes the phenomenological experience of self into account. Karsten and Bertau develop a theoretical argument on how ideas come into being and convincingly lay out how thinking is social, embodied, and dialogically organized because it is entangled with language.

Trying to understand cultural aspects of experience and human conduct inevitably invites taking a developmental perspective to studying how shared normativity is enacted in interactions with children. Several contributions stress the role of affect in these processes. Forrester pinpoints the shortcomings of common discursive approaches to address human affect and emotion. He proposes that psychoanalytical thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. Fantasia et al. address shared normativity by studying the relational dynamics in interactions of mothers suffering from postpartum depression with their infants. Their findings challenge traditional views on "intrusiveness" as based on specific individual behaviors and suggest that what hinders mutual coordination in these interactions is the absence or violation of interactional norms.

Cekaite and Ekström and Cekaite and Andrén studied emotion socialization practices in Swedish preschools using micro-analytic multimodal video analysis. They identified specific communicative practices through which the expression

## REFERENCES


of negative emotions is responded to as well as how laughter functions as an intricate process of inviting others into the common emotional and experiential ground. The studies shed light on the varied societal circumstances for learning and developing the norms and values that are communicated through these practices. In a similar vein, Takada studied the use of the term hazukashii (indicating shamefulness or embarrassment) in caregiver interactions with small children in Japanese families. His findings reveal that the term was commonly used to frame an action or act as inappropriate in a given context, but also to frame an activity as teasing and promoting a cooperative and pleasant atmosphere. Wiggins' paper discusses how the enjoyment of food and the sharing of mealtimes become a normative cultural and social practice by studying video-taped infant mealtimes in families in Scotland within a discursive psychology framework. Her findings reveal that eating enjoyment can be considered as much an interactional achievement as an individual sensation. Sirota's study looks at how children in U.S. middle class families in California are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as cultural indicators for proper comportment.

From a slightly different perspective, Aarsand investigated digital literacy practices in children's everyday lives at a Norwegian preschool. His findings shed light on how digital media become part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand and act in the world.

Raudaskoski and Klemmensen discuss the "turn to affect" as assemblage and emergence, and propose how linkages between episodes of affect as embodied social practice can be traced by drawing on Goodwin's multimodal ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) when studying institutional interactions with people who have an acquired brain injury.

All together, these papers provide a deep discussion of shared normativity as rooted in social interaction by considering its discursive, embodied, affective nature embedded in a material world. They also provide concrete suggestions for how to analyze these concepts empirically.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.


**Conflict of Interest:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2020 Demuth, Raudaskoski and Raudaskoski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Children's Laughter and Emotion Sharing With Peers and Adults in Preschool

Asta Cekaite\* and Mats Andrén

Child Studies, Department for Thematic Research, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3–5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children's and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children's laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize children's everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality, and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children's laughter in detail. It was found that children's laughter tended to be directed to children and adults' laughter tended to be directed to adults. Eighty seven percent of children's laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2.7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground.

Keywords: social interaction, emotion socialization practices, laughter analysis, child-adult and child-child conversations, shared norms and values

#### Edited by:

Pirkko Liisa Raudaskoski, Aalborg University, Denmark

#### Reviewed by:

Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki, Finland Marilena Fatigante, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

> \*Correspondence: Asta Cekaite asta.cekaite@liu.se

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 30 January 2019 Accepted: 01 April 2019 Published: 24 April 2019

#### Citation:

Cekaite A and Andrén M (2019) Children's Laughter and Emotion Sharing With Peers and Adults in Preschool. Front. Psychol. 10:852. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00852

**7**

# INTRODUCTION

Laughter is a mundane phenomenon and an expression of emotion that is ubiquitous in social life. Even very young children laugh, smile, and enjoy playful and humorous events (McGhee, 1989; Dunn, 2003) and there are many funny and entertaining elements and activities in children's everyday lives. It is argued that laughter is strongly social in inviting the others to attend to and share a particular emotional stance (Jefferson et al., 1987). Of course, laughter occurs for various reasons, not all of which are associated with funniness and humor. Nevertheless, laughter is, as any other expression of emotion, a significant feature of social life, and its occurrence and use by children is guided by various normative expectations and local values (Dunn, 2003; Cekaite, 2018). Studies, taking a social perspective on emotions, show that its occurrence, form and meaning are shaped deeply by the presence of others, roles, relationships, activities, and other contextual features (Glenn, 2003). Laughter is associated with social relational work, and, what we call "emotion sharing" in that it displays an emotional stance toward a particular focus of concern, and invites the interlocutor response and stance (Goodwin et al., 2012; see also Ruusuvuori, 2013).

However, little research, and especially, research that attends in detail to the social characteristics of laughter and emotion sharing, is available on children's laughter in contexts other than homes, although an increasing group of children worldwide spend a large part of their everyday life in early childhood education institutions. Such institutions are different from homes both in the activities and institutional roles involved, and they represent inherently multiparty settings, where a large number of children spend time together. It can therefore be assumed that the children's peer group constitutes a significant social and developmental arena (Blum-Kulka et al., 2004; Danby and Theobald, 2012; Cekaite et al., 2014). There is also a lack of studies on how children's use of laughter may vary depending on the type of recipient (children or adults).

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3- to 5-year-old children in Swedish preschools. The overall aim is to examine and present typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children's and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in an early education context<sup>1</sup> . The research questions asked are: (i) who laughs with whom—e.g., do children (and adults) laugh mainly with children or with adults? (ii) how do adults and children respond to each other's laughter? (iii) what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated?

Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize children's everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality and socialization (Rogoff, 2003; Hedegaard, 2009; Demuth, 2013). Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children's laughter in detail. By deploying multiple methods, we will attend to psychological phenomena as complex and embedded within situated, momentto-moment emerging embodied discursive practices of social interaction. The study aims to deepen our knowledge about emotion socialization by showing how laughter features in children's everyday life and social relations, both in children's peer group and between adult/educators and children in early childhood educational setting. It can thereby provide insights in the processes, social conditions and norms that can be influential for young children's learning to discern and express situationally appropriate emotions.

# PREVIOUS RESEARCH

## Emotional Expressions and Emotion Sharing

Emotional expressions play an important role in parent-infant interaction from the beginning of life (Trevarthen, 1985). In line with the social perspective, emotions are manifestly expressed and they are communicative phenomena (Harré and Gillet, 1994; Holodynski and Friedlmeier, 2010; Demuth, 2013). For instance, research on ontogenetic features of human development demonstrates that infants have a propensity for "emotion sharing" that involves basic practices of "expressive pointing" (Tomasello, 2019, p. 99) through which they "share information and attitudes with one another so as to build their common ground, both conceptually and emotionally" (p. 100).

Research on human social interaction has developed an empirically supported concept of emotional stance and located it within moment-to-moment development of social situation (Goodwin et al., 2012; Ruusuvuori, 2013; Goodwin, 2018). Stance-taking is conceptualized as an embodied process that involves expressions toward the specific focus of concern, and the recipient's (affiliative or disaffiliative) response to that stance. Emotional stances are configured by using multiple semiotic resources and modalities such as speech, intonation, bodily postures, and gestures (Goodwin et al., 2012). The notions of emotion stances in social interaction are closely related to emotion sharing (reciprocation) and can capture the interactive and relational work involved when people affiliate with, or avoid affiliating with each other's emotional states toward the referent of the emotional expression. In short, emotional expressions are communicative phenomena that often have both a referent (in cases of laughter, the laughable) and a recipient. For adults and children likewise, emotional stances, including laughter, are not just a matter of "expressing" an emotion but are often performed as a matter of sharing or not sharing an emotion (Bainum et al., 1984; Glenn, 2003; Cekaite, 2018).

Notably, in research on children's emotions, negative emotions have received much more attention than positive emotions. For instance, one of the important tenets of socialization and becoming a socio-emotionally competent is considered to involve mastery of emotion regulation that "has

<sup>1</sup>The study is also part of an ongoing research project that aims to further our understanding of the socialization of emotional expressions in Swedish everyday life settings, in preschools and homes. Financial grant from Swedish Research Council (Grant no: D0762601) is gratefully acknowledged (PI AC).

been chiefly focused on the increasing control that children exert over their frustration, anger, or distress" (Dunn, 2003, p. 337). However, whereas socialization into mastery of negative emotions tends to be seen as important because of their potential threat to the social harmony of the group, positive emotions are significant because they constitute a ground for sustained social relations and well-being. Studies suggest that children's expressions of positive emotions increase over the preschool years (Bainum et al., 1984; Barry and Kochanska, 2010). Barry and Kochanska (2010) studied children in American families longitudinally from infancy to early school age and found that expressions of positive emotions increased over time, whereas children's anger was highest at earlier ages and decreased thereafter. A possible interpretation is that a more positive and collaborative style of participation in social interaction becomes more important as children grow older and become more concerned with the establishment and negotiation of social relations such as friendship. Moreover, Sperling's (2012) study of emotion socialization in American homes with 8–12 year-old children (on the basis of video-recorded naturalistic family interactions) shows that expressions of positive emotions were three times as common as negative emotions. (cf. the frequent focus on negative emotions in research). In addition, the caregivers actively behaved in ways that prolonged the children's positive emotions by, for instance, reciprocating with their own displays of positive emotion (Bai et al., 2015), which we can interpret in terms of emotion sharing.

#### Research on Children's Laughter

One major line of research on positive emotions and laughter in children, especially within developmental psychology, deals with the emergence of laughter in ontogeny, which happens around the third or fourth month of life (Ruch and Ekman, 2001). Another line of research focuses on the children's development of humor (rather than laughter as such). Children tend to laugh at humorous stimuli and produce so called "laughables," inviting others to laugh at something that is relative to their current developmental stage (Pinderhughes and Zigler, 1985). They can play with and transform what they are learning and mastering at the time, e.g., playing with incongruent transformations of language structure, or social rules (Blum-Kulka et al., 2004; Cekaite, 2018). Joke-based humor involves more complex cognitive and pragmatic organization and children master these skills much later (McGhee, 1989). Research thus suggests that there are differences in what young children and adults consider to be entertaining and funny.

One of the prominent theories of laughter associates laughter with incongruencies. This goes back to scholars like Aristotle, Kant and Schopenhauer, and many researchers on humor agree that "humor is related to either comprehending or producing an incongruity: the simultaneous occurrence of incompatible elements or sudden contradiction of expectations" (Semrud-Clikeman and Glass, 2010, p. 1). The incongruity principle, however, does not fully explain why "some incongruities seem humorous while others do not" (Glenn, 2003, p. 21). For incongruity to be entertaining and socially appreciated, it has to be framed by communicative signals that indicate e.g., playfulness and humorous potentials (Bariaud, 1989). Yet another theory of laughter, foregrounded by Bergson (1911), argues that "laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers." Laughter is thus viewed as a social phenomenon that indicates and strengthens affiliations and the development of social relations. It should be pointed out that the connection between humor and laughter is not fully straightforward, and that laughter can have various social functions (Provine, 2000): laughter can be reciprocated but it can also sometimes be treated as undesirable because it is disturbing or teasing (Andrén and Cekaite, 2016).

Research on children's laughter in social situations (rather than children's cognitive capacities in humor comprehension), and especially in preschool settings is rare, though at least in Scandinavian countries, children spend a large part of their everyday life there. One of few studies of children's laughter, conducted in a nursery school (with 3–5-year-old children) in the United States (Bainum et al., 1984) found that smiling was much more common than laughter, but that laughter became increasingly more common with age. Bainum et al. conceptualize laughter and smiling as emotionally similar, but not equal emotional expressions and show that laughing and smiling co-occurred with children's different actions and event patterns (see also Sarra and Otta, 2001; Petitjean and Gonzales-Martinez, 2015). Laughter more frequently served to emphasize the intentional activities of another child or as "a means of calling attention to certain aspects of the child's own ongoing (silliness/clowning) behavior." (1984: 1955). Accordingly, this characterizes laughter as social, "highly sophisticated (even if unreflected) attempt to let the listener in on the 'nonserious' nature of the communication" (1984: 1956). Similarly, studies of children in preschool and primary school and children's prominent entertaining communicative genres based on incongruency—children's language play—show that laughter was used to invite peers' affiliation and, in such way, create exciting time-out from the institutional agenda of the educational setting (Cekaite and Aronsson, 2014; Cekaite, 2018). In all, the studies point to the importance of studying the actual social and interactional practices in which children's laughter evolves. Notably, research has not dealt much with laughter in child-adult—intergenerational—encounters.

## Social Interactional Studies of Laughter

Laughter in social interaction (between adults), its functions and organization, have been investigated in a substantial number of studies within the interaction analytic approach (Jefferson, 1979; Jefferson et al., 1987; Fatigante et al., 1998; Glenn, 2003; Glenn and Holt, 2013). Several of the findings have a significant bearing on this study. Interactional research shows that laughter is a highly ordered interactional phenomenon that has considerable variation both in its forms and functions. When someone is laughing this is heard as referring to what one is laughing about<sup>2</sup> (Jefferson et al., 1987), sometimes called the "laughable" (Glenn, 2003). Henceforth in this study we will refer to laughter as being

<sup>2</sup>Already at 10 months children very rarely laugh without a recognizable reason, (Kawakami et al., 2009).

"directed at" someone. Interactional research also shows that the "laughable" can be highly varied, ranging from concrete, incongruent, actions to sophisticated jokes. Moreover, laughter is embodied, and especially gaze is important because it tends to indicate the recipient of the laughter (Markaki et al., 2010). Previous studies have described different possible responses to laughter: participants can join laughter and affiliate with it, or ignore it and offer serious responses instead (Jefferson et al., 1987). Smiling can also be used to respond to laughter. Distinctions have been made between "laughing at" (distancing at somebody/something through laughter) and "laughing with." Affiliative effects of laughter as emotion sharing are particularly interesting in multiparty institutional settings (e.g., preschool) because in this collective organization it can contribute to local alliances and group partitions.

In the present study we combine insights from earlier research on children's laughter, and studies taking a social interactional perspective to examine children's laughter in preschool as early childhood socializing setting characterized by various participant—child-child and child-adult—constellations. We suggest that analyses of recurrent patterns, and social organization of laughter situations are relevant for our holistic understanding of the contextual embedding, normative expectations and social actors that are involved in young children's affective, and communicative socialization.

# METHODS

#### Setting, Data and Analytical Procedures

In Sweden, public preschools constitute a significant early education institution that has multiple goals, which include both education and care. Ninety two percent of children between 1 and 5 years attend preschool and on average, they spend 31 h a week there (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2015). The aims and work methods of preschools (the only type of early childhood education institution in Sweden) are defined by the Swedish National Curriculum that foregrounds a holistic approach to child development, learning, and emotional wellbeing. Preschool activities comprise play, education, and care, with a considerable emphasis on children's free play.

The data for the present study is naturalistic and was collected in two regular, public Swedish preschools for 1–5-year-old children, located in a middle-class area. The data consists of 77 h of video recordings, collected over a period of 1.5 years. The Regional Ethical Board in Linköping has approved the project<sup>3</sup> . 20.5 h of video-data were used for the analysis, and this was selected on the basis of containing everyday institutional practices for 3–5-year-old children. There were ∼25 children and six educators in each preschool unit where data was collected and analyzed. The recordings involved a range of activities that are part of a regular day at the Swedish preschools: free play (the children are free to choose with whom and with what to play and they typically socialize in smaller groups), circle time (all or most children gather to educator-led educative activities, including snack/fruit time), book reading (one preschool educator reads a book to a smaller group of children), lunch time (smaller groups of children sit at tables in different rooms together with one or two educators), children drawing (with or without a preschool educator present), and more. During a preschool day, adults were present during educational, or practical institutional activities, such as reading, circle time, drawing, similar artwork, or mealtimes. Children's free play activities were largely conducted without close supervision by adults.

# Coding for Quantitative Analysis

Coding for the quantitative analysis was done using the ELAN freeware software. Instances of laughter were identified in the video recordings until the total exceeded 1,000 instances, yielding a total of 1,047 instances. This included any kind of laughter from adults or children, except silent laughter that has similar movement patterns but no sound is produced. It was also noted how many adults that were present when each instance of laughter occurred.

Each instance of laughter was coded to indicate (a) whether an adult or a child produced it and (b) whether the laughter was directed to an adult or a child as the recipient. This yields four categories:child-to-child,child-to-adult, adult-to-child, and adult-to-adult. In most cases the recipient of laughter corresponds to the one being looked at by the person who laughs: a child or an adult. In some cases, gaze is not directed to the recipient, but other contextual cues indicated to whom the laughter is directed. There were only a few (9) instances of laughter (all produced by children) that didn't seem to be directed to someone else, and these were excluded from further analysis (leaving 1,038 cases in total). For instances of child-toadult laughter, we also coded whether the adult's response to this laughter was categorized as either affirming, no response, or rejecting. These categories are described further as part of the analysis.

# QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS

This section provides descriptive statistics of overarching patterns in the data. It serves as a background to the qualitative analysis, where findings from the quantitative part are unpacked by showing the underlying interactional dynamics that are involved in the institutional context of the preschool. In this way, the quantitative and the qualitative parts of the analysis complement each other.

One thousand and thirty eight instances of laughter were identified in the 20.5 h of data that was analyzed. There were 891 instances (86%) of child laughter and 147 instances (14%) of adult laughter. This makes child laughter six times as frequent as adult laughter, meaning that the average child will experience substantially more peer laughter than adult laughter in this preschool context.

There is markedly more child laughter in the data, but this does not necessarily mean that each individual child laughs more often than individual adults do. It is because there are also substantially more children than adults at the preschool. At Swedish preschools there are about five children per adult (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2015). Nevertheless,

<sup>3</sup>The project has been approved by Regionala etikprövningsnämnden i Linköping, Avdelning för prövning av övrig forskning, Linköping University, Hälsouniversitets kansli, Sandbäcksgatan 7, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden.

this still means that each individual child will experience much more child laughter than adult laughter at the preschool. Furthermore, as shown in **Figure 1**, most of the child laughter was also directed to another child (n = 775; 87%) rather than to an adult (n = 116; 13%). Overall, child-to-child laughter constitutes as much as 75% of all the instances of laughter, both by adults and children, in the data. Consequently, laughter at the preschool is to a large extent a matter of peer interaction, as has also been found in a number of other areas (Cekaite and Aronsson, 2014).

Regarding adult laughter, there were slightly more instances that were directed to a child (n = 82; 56%) than to another adult (n = 65; 44%). However, this doesn't mean that the adults at the preschool were more inclined to laugh together with children than with other adults. It is actually the other way around. To understand why one should note that two or more adults were present only for 22% of the duration of the analyzed data. This is relevant because the only time adult-to-adult laughter could possibly occur is when two or more adults are present. By contrast, child-to-child laughter could occur at virtually any time. Taking this into account, **Figure 2** shows the number of instances of laughter per minute, based on the amount of time that each category could possibly occur. This reveals that adults' laughter was directed at other adults 2.7 times more often than to children, provided that other adults were around. The overall pattern that emerges is that the children tended to direct their laughter to other children and the adults tended to direct their laughter to other adults.

A related finding is that children laugh less when adults are around, as shown in **Figure 3**. When adults are absent, child-tochild laughter occurs at a rate of 0.90 instances per minute. When adults are present, there are only 0.56 instances of child-to-child per minute (and 0.13 instances of child-to-adult laughter per minute). This finding adds another dimension to the pattern that children mainly laugh with children and that adults mainly laugh with adults. The presence of adults clearly decreases children's tendency to laugh.

Why would the presence of adults have this effect? Possible reasons for this will be discussed further as part of the qualitative analysis (e.g., activity contexts where adults are present usually involved educational or other task-oriented activities, whereas children spent considerable amount of time in the peer group during free play). However, looking at the ways that adults respond to children's laughter, when the laughter is directed to adults (child-to-adult laughter), may provide some background to this. **Figure 4** gives an overview of how the adults responded to child-to-adult laughter in the data. In 69% of the cases, adults responded in an affirmative way. This means that the adult reciprocated the positive emotional stance of the child's laughter in some way. Since the affirmative category was relatively large, it is broken down into three sub-categories in **Figure 4**. This shows that 27% of the adult responses to child-to-adult laughter were cases where the adult also laughed. In 30% of the cases, overall, the adult did not laugh, but smiled as part of their response to the child. In 12% of the cases, the response was still affirmative, but the affirmation was mainly done verbally, and did not contain laughter or smiling from the adult.

In 21% of the cases, the response from the adult was what we have coded as "no reaction." These are cases where the actions or the speech of the adult show no manifest orientation to the child's act of laughing. For instance, an adult may be speaking and a child laughs in response to something that the adult says, but the adult keeps talking as if nothing happened.

Finally, in 10% of the cases, the response of the adult is coded as "rejecting." This includes cases where the adult explicitly opposes or rejects the act of laughing, either because it is not deemed appropriate to laugh at a particular type of laughable (e.g., in the case of mocking) or because the very sound and

engagement in laughter may disturb some ongoing activity (e.g., during activities where the children are supposed to remain silent or participate attentively in book reading).

Overall, in a majority of the cases, the child-to-adult laughter is affirmed in some way in the adults' responses. At the same time, it is relevant to note that out of all of the child laughter in the data, including both child-to-child and child-to-adult laughter, only 2% are cases where a child directs laughter to an adult and the adult's response also contains laughter. Shared laughter across the generations is not common<sup>4</sup> . This adds yet another dimension to the finding that the children mainly laugh with children, and the adults mainly laugh with adults. We will now turn to the qualitative analysis to provide some insights into the

<sup>4</sup>A related finding from an unpublished quantitative analysis of the same data is that adult laughter in response to children's communicative actions that are designed to invite laughter is rare in the data overall: only 3% of all the instances of laughter.

social situations that characterize children's laughter as well as adult responses to children's laughter.

# QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

The focus of the qualitative analysis concerns children's laughter when it is directed to adults, peers or both. The analysis examines: (i) the activity contexts of laughter; (ii) the trajectories of entire laughter situations; (iii) responses to laughter, i.e., emotional stances, affiliation and emotion sharing. We will examine situations where adults respond to children's laughter and situations where children direct their laughter to their peers. In doing so, we aim to gain insights into the dynamics of child-to-child laughter, and child-to-adult laughter. Attention to situations where children's laughter occurs in the proximity of adults can reveal social dynamics and emotion socialization potentials linked to laughter (and emotion sharing) between various participant constellations, as well as conditions for intergenerational emotion sharing.

The qualitative analysis employs a multimodal interactional approach (Goodwin, 2000) that inductively examines how embodied social actions are accomplished in social encounters. The study analyzes what participants accomplish socially in a moment-by-moment interaction by using turn-by-turn meaning making procedures as the interaction evolves. Multimodal interaction analysis utilizes video recordings in order to examine in detail participants' verbal and embodied social actions emerging within the spatio-material configurations of the environment. Analytic orientation is on participants' verbal turntaking and coordinated use of multiple modalities (such as gaze, touch, sound) (Goodwin, 2000). By examining how participants themselves orient to each other's actions sequentially, turn-byturn, analysts see evidence of how the participants interpret and analyze each other's actions, and accomplish particular activities. In this study, the analytical focus was on children's and adults' laughter and what can be identified as the interactional response to laughter, displayed through the participants' publicly visible actions. To be able to exemplify the embodied features of situations of laughter, we use images, made for the specific study<sup>5</sup> .

# Children's Adult-Directed Laughter and Adult Responses

The children directed their laughter to adults in 13% of the cases of children's laughter, receiving various types of responses. In this section, we will look more closely at the range of adults' affirmative responses, as well as situations where there is a lack of adults' responses to children's laughter. An example that involves an adult's rejecting response is examined in a later section of the qualitative analyses, when discussing children's peer laughter (Ex. 5a–b).

# Adult Affirmation Through Smiling and Other Means of Emotion Sharing

Most often, episodes where the children's laughter was directed to adults involved situations where the adults were in charge of educational institutional activities. The child's laughter was then received in various ways, including the adult's non-response, or affirmation through smiling, or other means. Such adult responses indicate that the children's laughter and emotional stances were not rejected or disciplined by the teachers, but were corroborated by the teacher's modulated affiliative smile or by

<sup>5</sup>The illustrations (line drawings) are original and have not been published before. They are unique and are made specifically for the present research study.

other means, or they were ignored, usually in the service of the continuous progression of the ongoing educational activity.

The children's laughter could evolve in relation to some entertaining feature of the teachers' ongoing activity, such as book-reading or story-telling, a culturally typical emotionally engaging activity (Cekaite and Björk-Willén, 2018), where the adult's actions were affectively valorized in ways that made possible or even invited the children's display of a positive stance. The children's laughter as emotion sharing was not limited to a single participant, e.g., the teacher, but could be addressed and distributed across the peer group as well. In Ex. 1, a group of 3–5-year-old children (mostly girls) sit together with the teacher in a sofa, listening to the teacher reading a story about nice monsters. Olivia laughs appreciatively toward various participants of the activity.

The teacher uses positive reading voice when Olivia, while looking at the book, laughs appreciatively (line 2). The teacher does not respond to the girl's laughter, but continues to read the story, and proceeds with her institutional task. Olivia then turns toward her peer, Wilma, who sits at her side, and Wilma bursts out in reciprocal laughter, affiliating with Olivia's emotional stance (line 4, Fig. 1-2). In this way, a moment of shared positive emotion is initiated and sustained by the girls. Olivia carries further her laughter and affective stance toward the teacher, laughingly turning toward her and the book (line 5). The teacher, however, continues reading; she does not reciprocate the Olivia's laughter, but she now reads with markedly positive entertaining voice, and for a short moment turns to the girl with a smile (line 7). In these embodied ways, the teacher responds to and confirms Olivia's laughter as an expression of her positive stance.

Ex. 1. Participants: Teacher; girls Olivia (5.1 y.); Wilma (3.2 y.).


Fig.3

10. Teacher: O:h det var **hä**rligt att han har en **vä**n. Fig.3 *O:h it was* **wo***nderful that he has a* **frie***nd.*

More possibilities for emotion sharing between the child and adult are established as the reading progresses. The final line of the story "lucky you little monster that you have a real friend" is produced by the teacher with a smile, and a gaze directed at the girl (line 8). As a result, the teacher sustains the positive stance, earlier invoked by the girl. Olivia reciprocates the teacher's positive stance by repeating the story line "lucky you little monster" with laughter, and the teacher once again affiliates, shares and confirms the positive emotional stance through her smile and positive voice (rather than through laughter) (line 10, Fig. 3). She also uses verbal means, an assessment "oh it was wonderful that he has a friend" of the story, in such way confirming emotion sharing and culturally appropriate interpretation of the story (Bruner, 1990; Cekaite and Björk-Willén, 2018).

As demonstrated, the children's laughter and various responses to it in a particular activity context support emotional attunement between the child and the adult, and in the children's peer group. The children's laughter has multiple recipients, and (in book reading context) can be directed at the adult, who may not reciprocate with laughter, but use affirmation through other means. Overly positive voice and smiles are used for both confirming and regulating the girl's emotion. In contrast, peers provide a fruitful social context for emotion sharing through reciprocal laughter. Notably, the children are socialized into, and supported in their engagement in a particular emotional interpretation of a narrative-based social relations, but with varying emotional intensity: similar emotional stances are shared with both peer and adult, but the communicative means and their affective intensity are different.

#### Adults' Affirmation Through Laughter

Adults reciprocated children's laughter in, for instance, more informal situations that were not guided by educational agenda. Such laughter was, for instance, related to adults' engagement in face work when children laughed about their unexpected mistake or other type of incongruent act. In Ex. 2, during snack time, Mea is buttering her bread and is about to put a butter knife in her mouth. The teacher, who is serving the children at the same table, mildly remarks on Mea's mistake (line 1).

As Mea is about to put a butter knife in her mouth (by mistake), the teacher mildly and with a smile reprimands her (line 1), and the girl turns away and, in an embarrassed voice, makes an excuse, justifying her mistake "I thought this was my fork," and adds some laugher (line 2). It is this embarrassed laughter that the teacher reciprocates and asks a playful question "Were you about to (.) get (.) get lost (.) or?" (lines 3, 5). Both the teacher and the children (Emilia and Mea) collaborate by mildly joking about and thereby justifying Mea's mistake, thus performing some face work in this slightly embarrassing situation. Shared laughter and smiles work to downgrade and mitigate the girl's inappropriate conduct (lines 2–8). The teacher, however, does not continue laughter, but makes a smiley supportive comment on Mea's account (line 8).

As demonstrated, during an extended laughter situation, various responses to the child's laugher are available and adultaffirmative responses can vary in the degree to which they affiliate the child's laughter. The child's emotional stance is temporarily reciprocated by adult's laughter used as a face-saving affiliative device. Smiling responses affirm the positive emotional stance expressed by the child's laughter and go a long way in achieving alignment between the child and the adult. However, by using a smile instead of laughter in response, the adult may display a less strong affiliation, since smiling often serves as a less strong positive expression than laughter.

## Children's Peer Directed Laughter

Children's peer-directed laughter was the most frequent category in the present data. Laughter served several functions, and its social and physical characteristics influenced how the children used it and how the preschool teachers oriented to it. Reciprocal laughter could, through emotion sharing, be used to strengthen the children's in-group alliances and emotional coalitions. Laughter in the peer group could also develop into loud laughter outbursts that disturbed and interrupted the ongoing institutional activity. The analysis shows that children laughed at something incongruent; made rudimentary jokes with various degrees of incongruity, e.g., verbal and sound play; marked their play acts and play roles, drew attention to something exciting (e.g., silliness/clowning events), or laughed appreciatively toward something in their environments (stories, talk, objects).

Ex. 2. Participants: Teacher; girls Mea (5.4 y.), Emilia (4.1y.).

```
1. Teacher: U-u.
            No-no. ((looks at Mea))
2. Mea: Ha ha. Jag trodde det var min gaffel! Ha ha.
            Ha ha. I thought this was my fork!
            Ha ha. ((turns away,'embarrassed' voice))
3. Teacher: Ha ha
4. Emilia: ((smiles, looking at Mea))
5. Teacher: Höll du på att (.) komma (.) komma bort dig eller?
            Were you about to (.) get (.) get lost (.) or?
6. Mea: Nej jag trodde det var min gaffel!
            No I thought it was my fork!
7. Emilia: Ha ha ha ha.
8. Teacher: Vilken tur att du kom på att det inte var det!
            It's lucky that you discovered that it wasn't.((smiling))
```
The teacher is oriented to various institutional tasks: children's eating and conversing. She sustains conversation with Mea by asking numerous questions in a serious, matter-of-fact, manner (lines 1; 6). Emilia, instead, finds some laughable potential in Mea's mentioning of "macka packa," and identifies it as language play and pun (line 7) (Cekaite and Aronsson, 2014). While the teacher orients toward the child's factual message and creates interactional possibilities for Mea to expand her story, the peer exploits entertaining potentials of the formal aspects of Mea's talk: Emilia tells a rudimentary joke and invites the peer's laughter "When you say Macka Packa I thinking about a macka (sandwich)" (line 7). She creates excitement by using gaze and facial expression to invite her peer's reciprocal emotional stance (Fig. 2; 3). Emilia is shaking with laughter, moving her torso and laughing with her mouth wide open. Embodied laughter performance intensifies upon Mea joining in and reciprocating laughter. Emilia hits the table with her hand, looking at Mea and they laugh together, while looking at each other. The girls' mutual gaze attests their joint emotional stance, sustained for a rather extended time and even Tina, who was not specifically addressed by Emilia's laughter, joins their laughter (lines 8–9, 11–13; Fig. 2– 4). The teacher's comment"and you have one right in front of you"

invites a closure of the girls' laughter (line 10).

Notably, Emilia's joke was not directed at the teacher, but, since the children and the teacher together were participating in and listening to Mea's telling, one could assume that the teacher could potentially respond to the joke. The teacher, however, does not join the girls' laughter. Rather, she re-orients the girls to the institutional task of eating sandwiches (line 10). Comparing

In this section, we will demonstrate some of the prevalent patters of children's peer laughter and describe its social interactional functions and features. In that we are interested in children's laughter and the intergenerational characteristics of children's experiences and emotion socialization in early childhood education, we here attend to children's laughter that occurs in situations when the adults are present. Thus, while the primary focus is children's peer laughter, the analysis also pays attention to the adults' conduct when children's laughter occurs in vicinity of educators.

# Child-Child Reciprocation of Laughter: Peer Affiliation and Emotion Sharing

Interaction analysis shows that during the ongoing flow of preschool activities, the children were able to discern laughable elements in their peer's talk or entertaining performances and, by using embodied resources, present them to their peers as laughables. Below we will demonstrate how children's peer group laughter is reciprocated and evolves into emotion sharing between the peer group members. The teacher, however, typically orients to the situation as a task-related one, rather than fully affiliating with the children.

In Ex. 3, three girls and a teacher are eating snacks (sandwiches, called "macka" in informal Swedish) and Mea starts talking about "Macka Packa" (a character with big ears in children's TV show). The teacher then asks Mea questions about this character and tries to initiate her explanation and narrative about it.

Ex. 3. Teacher, girls Mea (5.4 y.), Emilia (4.1 y.), Tina (4.5 y.).


*It is just a girl underneath pretending.*



the children's and adult's responses to the joke, it is notable that the girls reciprocate laughter and build an affective alliance, sharing, and affiliating each other's emotional stance (e.g., hitting table, leaning forth, looking at each other). This social situation can be seen to strengthen social—friendship—relations between the girls. The teacher does not reject or discipline the girls' laughter, but observes the situation with a smile (line 14), aligning with the girls' experience of fun. However, she primarily deals with the progression of her institutional task (lines 10, 14).

# Children's Multiparty Laughter as Choral Emotion Sharing in the Peer Group

In a multiparty preschool context, where multiple children participated in activities together, they recurrently engaged in and invited the others (their peers and at times, teachers) to take a similar emotion stance toward some exciting object, event or act (e.g., Cekaite and Strid, in press). Such typically embodied and material artifact-linked laughter invitations to share excitement could be responded to with similar emotion stances. Multiparty reciprocal laughter bouts provided affordances to build group coalition and strengthen the group's shared experiential stance.

In Ex. 4, during a handicraft activity, the teacher and children are modeling dough to make the three billy-goat shaped figures. The teacher is in a close proximity to the children; she instructs how to do the task and distributes a piece of dough to each child. One of the children, Joel, (on the teacher's left side) hits his dough, while laughing with excitement.

#### Ex. 4. Teacher; boys Joel, (5.2 y.); John (4.8 y.), Lucas (4.5 y.); a girl Agnes (4.8 y.).

01. Teacher: Rulla lite med degen först. *Roll your dough a bit first. ((serious voice))*


*Wow* **goo***d!((kneads dough, smiley voice))*


Joel: *((laughing shows his dough to other boys))* Fi*g.2* 10. Boys: *((look at Joel smiling))*

Fi*g.3*. 11. John: Kolla min **stö**hhrsta bock! Fig. *3 Look at my* **la***hhrgest billy goat! ((laughing shows his dough))* 12. Lucas: Kolla min **stö**rsta bock!

*Look at my* **la***rgest billy goat. ((shows his dough))*

The children respond to the teacher's matter-of-fact instructions by rolling, playing and laughing about the billy-goat shapes of dough. Joel laughs while hitting his piece of dough (Fig. 1). The peer group are attentive to Joel's entertaining act: they look up, smiling, and join in his play actions (lines 3, 5, 6). When John playfully transforms his dough into a flying object, his entertaining act is appreciated: Joel's laughter invites affiliation and emotion sharing across the peer group (lines 6–12). The boys' laughing bout continues when Joel draws the other's attention to a new playful act with appended laughter tokens "look at my little billy goat" (line 9). By continuing play and laughter, the peer group members sustain their emotion sharing, strengthening and consolidating the in-group solidarity. John's talk is interspaced with laugher tokens, while he displays his piece of dough to the boys, using repetitive transformation "look at my largest billy goat" (line 11, Fig. 3). The teacher in this case continues her institutional task rather than paying attention to or disciplining the children's multiparty laughter and play.

# Children's Peer Laughter and Adult Disciplining: Resistance by Laughing and Joking

The children directed laughter toward peers and adults in situations when they committed some mild normative

Ex. 5a. Participants: Teacher; girls, Olivia (4,5 y.), Lilly (4,1 y.). 01. Olivia: **MÅ**LA!

transgressions, e.g., painted wrongly, commented on food, or laughed at some aspects of the others' behavior. The children knew about rules and adults' insistence on obeying them, therefore they could find breaking the rules entertaining. In such cases, children's laughter strengthened the enjoyable potentials of the incongruent act that constituted a normative transgression from the institutional practice. When directed at the member of the peer group, children's laughter was reciprocated and involved group emotion-sharing and group coalition. If deemed as disruptive of the institutional activity, such peer-group laughter was not only ignored or rejected by the educators, but, together with normatively transgressive actions, it was evaluated by the teachers as situationally inappropriate and disruptive of the preschool activity. Notably, the teachers' management of children's emotional expressions invoked and brought forth the usually unspoken norms for normatively expected, attentive, and leveled actions.

In Ex. 5a–b, four 3–4 year-old girls are painting with water colors. Olivia and Lilly are splashing water around them, covering their hands in color and destroying the paper. The teacher repeatedly disciplines them mildly, but the girls do not comply.



The teacher's disciplining comment "I think that this has gotten out of control!" is responded to with girls' exuberant reciprocal laughter, that expresses their shared emotional stance that strengthens their emotional group coalition and resistance toward the teacher's disciplining comment (lines 6–9, Fig. 1) (Bergson, 1911). The girls' peer laughter clearly displays their awareness and enjoyment of the situationally incongruent actions. It also achieves some teasing toward the teacher, who then uses a directive to close down the girls' activity ["girls now you have to finish (painting)"] but she only receives more resistance ("no because we are painting") (lines 6; 8–9). Notably, the girls repeatedly initiate and reciprocate each other's laughter in ways that mark their enjoyment of inappropriate acts and playful resistance toward the teacher's attempts to control their actions.

Despite the teacher's disciplining, the girls continue their mischievous way of painting and use a lot of water. Olivia with very loud falsetto laughter and with a great deal of excitement displays her hands covered with color and instructs her friend how to do this clearly institutionally inappropriate kind of painting (line 1, Ex. 5b).

Both girls start splashing water with great excitement but the teacher disciplines them very loudly, demanding that they stop (line 4). They turn to the teacher and attentively observe her, but yet again, they respond to the teacher's reprimand by shared laughter (loud falsetto) that this time is directed at the teacher (lines 5–6, Fig. 2). This is an example of how children's laughter directed to the teacher is rejected and disciplined. In response to the girls' teasing laughter, the teacher upgrades her reprimand, loudly demanding them to witness the serious consequences of their misconduct "look it splashed all the way over here" (line 7), but to no avail. Through embodied means, the girls consolidate their playful resistance that clearly demonstrates an antithetical emotional expression and contrasts with the teacher's serious stance. The teacher then clearly rejects the girls' laughter and disciplines the girls' actions by finishing their drawing activity (line 12).

As demonstrated, the girls resist the teacher's serious and disciplining mode by engaging—inviting and sharing—a resistant, recalcitrant emotional stance, embellished with shared laughter (and a collective assessment "very funny" (lines 9– 10). The children's shared laughter is embodied: its loudness,

**Ex. 5b**


04. Teacher: Det **rä**cker! STOPP. STOPP NI. Fig. 2 *That's en***oug***h. STOP. LISTEN STOP.*



*LOOK. IT SPLASHED ALL THE WAY OVER HERE! ON MY ARM! ((points at her hand))* 08. Girls: *((look at the teacher))*


the girls' mutual gaze, and its position as a response to the teacher's disciplining directives show that girls engage in emotion coalition, and use laughter to achieve group affiliation by repeatedly resisting the teacher. The girls' laughter accomplishes both affiliative (laughing together) and disaffiliative work (laughing at the teacher's disciplining) with possible consequences for the social relationships within the group.

## CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

The present study has examined quantitative and qualitative patterns of 3–5 year-old children's and adults' laughter in a regular Swedish preschool. In our multi-method examination, we explored young children's embodied, interactional and affective engagements with the world, constitutive of and constituting shared norms and common ground in children's peer, and intergenerational encounters. The study contributes to a rather underexplored research area, namely young children's spontaneous laughter, its social functions, and peer group and adults' responses to it. This multi-method study reveals that young children's emotion sharing through laughter was a matter of generational—children's peer group—socialization.

It was found that children's laughter tended to be directed to children and adults' laughter tended to be directed to adults, meaning that laughter at the preschool was mainly a matter of peer interaction. Eighty seven percent of children's laughter was directed to other children (see Fig. 1), and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2.7 times as often as to children, providing that other adults were around (see Fig. 2). In addition to this, it was also found that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool, i.e., securing the smooth flow of preschool activities. Intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence. This is illustrated by that fact that out of all the cases where a child laughed, only 2% of these involved an adult laughing in response.

These findings should not be interpreted as implying that the interaction between adults and children at the preschool was not characterized by warmth and respectfulness and that children and adults in laughter situations did not engage in affiliation and emotion sharing. In the following, we will discuss the results in detail.

#### Adult Responses to Children's Laughter

As demonstrated, adults responded to children's laughter with a smile or other types of affirmation, and sometimes with laughter. When a child's laughter was directed to an adult recipient, the most common way for adults to respond was affirmation through smiling (30%), laughter (27%), or other means (12 %, Fig. 4). Notably, whereas adults' smiles confirm the positive emotion expressed by the child, it also means that the adult is not fully joining in with actual shared laughter where both parties are laughing (Ex. 2), although smiling responses do not reject the child's positive affective stance. Notably, adults' smiles in response to children's laughter do not interrupt the ongoing verbal activity and allow the adult to simultaneously affiliate with the child,

and sustain the progression of the institutional activities. In all, smiling and affirmation through other means can be seen as a way of affiliating with emotion display, but with lesser intensity.

Adult responses to children's laughter were far from always a matter of affirmation and affiliation. In one third of adult responses to children's laughter, the response was not affirmative: adults did not respond at all (21%), or even explicitly rejected or opposed the child's laughter (10%, Fig. 4). Adults rejected and disciplined children when their laughter and actions were disturbing the institutional arrangements, and the qualitative analysis showed that such laughter could serve as a social resource for children's in-group solidarity, rapport, and shared sense of entertainment with peers (e.g., Bergson, 1911) (Ex. 5a; b). It was also found that children laughed more in situations where adults were not present, which implies that the presence of adults (who were usually organizing educational activities) has a constraining effect on children's tendency to laugh. Overall, the qualitative analysis showed that adults were concerned with preserving the smooth progression of institutional activities and modified their responses to children's laughter to fit these situational requirements, at times, modulating and regulating children's emotional expressions during their extended laughter bouts. In addition, the children's laughables were usually anchored in their peer group concerns, and could exhibit less potential for entertainment for adults.

The above findings, however, do not suggest that adults did not take part in socializing the children into positive emotion-sharing. Sometimes, the adults acted in ways that draw the children's attention to something entertaining and noteworthy, inviting their affective response (Ex. 2), but they did not reciprocate the children's laugher by laughing themselves. Such cases suggest that adults invited, and to some extent, provided guidelines for situationally appropriate displays of emotional stances. In this way, the adults also acted as socializing agents that instilled in children normative expectations and shared ways of demonstrating and reciprocating (or not) positive emotions. They took part in emotion socialization by providing institutionally approved interactional spaces for children's emotional displays of laughter. While the adults partially aligned with children's activities and emotional worlds, and displayed their understanding of what constitutes fun for the children, they also monitored the quality, duration, loudness, and content of the children's laughter and disciplined cases which they deemed to be inappropriate (Ex. 5a; b).

#### Children's Peer-Directed Laughter

As demonstrated, in the preschool setting, the children direct more laughter to their peers than to adults (0.90 and 0.13 occurrences per minute, respectively, Fig. 3) and they laugh more when adults are absent compared to when they are copresent (0.90 and 0.54 occurrences per minute, respectively, Fig. 3). The qualitative analysis of the children's peer laughter showed that incongruency was a recurrent cause of laughter. The peer group members both provided a target of laughter, and were active recipients of laughter and emotion-sharing. Finding, identifying and picking up something for the other children to notice and emotionally share was done in an interactionally competent way even by young children. The object of laughter was clearly linked to the children's own activities (play, jokes, norm-breaking) and laughter was directed to the peers (Ex. 3; 4; 5a-b). The peers built up multiparty emotional affiliation; children's shared laughter could arise in situations where it became a way to establish and confirm a joint stance that was resistant toward the adult authority. Such laughables and playful acts attracted the peers' attention, and reciprocal laughter, smiling, repetition of playful acts, contributed to achievement of in-group solidarity (Bergson, 1911), common ground and peer group values.

As demonstrated, the children's laughter usually extended beyond a single instance. The multimodal interaction analysis revealed that even young children skillfully achieved a collective stance of rapport and funniness, as they initiated and shared it through publicly observable reciprocal laughter. Episodes of laughter did not follow a pre-determined trajectory, but were organized in an emergent way, by mild or louder, individual or collective, dispersed or coordinated laughter. The embodied features of the children's shared laughter show how laughter in the peer group was used in the pursuit and establishment of affiliation and rapport. Cascades of publicly and visibly shared laughter between the peers created an environment where the children organized their peer relationships (Goodwin, 1990), thereby constituting a significant emotion socialization power in a preschool context.

#### Methodological Discussion

The present study has combined descriptive quantitative results and used them as a point of departure for detailed examination of the social characteristics and functions of children's and adults' laughter. Quantitative results provided an overall image of the recurrent patterns of how children and adults used laughter in preschool activities. The qualitative analysis allowed insights into the social organization, functions, and emotion-sharing potentials of laughter in and between the generations. The multimodal interaction analysis revealed how laughter served as a social resource for emotion-sharing and how it was an embodied matter (e.g., smiles and bodily orientation are easily missed in other types of data). Interaction analysis also allowed insights into the specific ways in which emotional expressions in social interaction were not simply an individual one-directional affair, rather they had a recipient from whom affiliation was sought. In all, through multimodal interaction analysis of participants' actions, it was possible to attend to psychological phenomena as shaped in human activity and intertwined with embodied social interaction (Goodwin, 2018).

Overall, the study suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity (cf. Linell, 2009, p. 82) in their everyday life (a similar investigation in family settings can provide additional knowledge on emotion-sharing between children and parents). Laughter is thus not simply a matter of emotion affiliation and sharedness. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground.

#### ETHICS STATEMENT

The study has been approved by Regional Ethics Board (Östergötland County). The data used for this study was collected as part of a larger research project subjected to ethical vetting by a regional committee for research ethics. Written and oral information was provided to staff and parents, and a consent form was signed for those adults who wished to participate (for parents, this consent also included their children). When visiting the pre-school, the researcher frequently asked the children's permission for recording, and the researcher was sensitive to signs of discomfort from the children that could be associated with

#### REFERENCES


Danby, S., and Theobald, M. (2012). Disputes in Everyday Life. Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People. Singapore: Emerald Press.


being observed for the study. To avoid for the participants to be recognized, detailed information about the participants is not provided, and the sketches used for illustrative purposes are anonymized.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Both authors have contributed to the study, to qualitative and quantitative parts, and to the formulation and general description of the study.

#### FUNDING

Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) Grant D0762601; PI AC. Linköping Library: Contribution to publishing in open access journals.


Harré, R., and Gillet, G. (1994). The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Cekaite and Andrén. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS


# Categorization Activities in Norwegian Preschools: Digital Tools in Identifying, Articulating, and Assessing

#### Pål Aarsand\*

Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

The article explores digital literacy practices in children's everyday lives at Norwegian preschools and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic digital literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on 70 h of video recordings documenting the activities in which 45 children, aged 5 and 6, and 8 preschool teachers participated. Through the detailed analysis of two categorization activities – identifying geometrical shapes and identifying feelings/thoughts – the use of digital tools in the social organization of the activities is examined. The article finds that children's digital literacy activities encompass visual, verbal, audio and embodied competencies that become relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in the interaction between the children and between the adults and children by serving as norms and guidelines for what constitutes correct categorizations (geometrical shapes and green and red feelings) in the situated activities, and that are appropriated and actualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings also show how the categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing, and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures, and socialites that are part of these categorization practices; they are part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand, and act in the world. Moreover, the different technologies created different conditions for the children's participation. It was found that peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets, while when using non-mobile technologies, e.g., smartboards, the activities were structured more as 'classic' classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard.

Keywords: digital literacy, children, categorization, ethnomethodology, guided participation, professional vision, digital competence, preschool

# INTRODUCTION

Digital literacy practices have become an intrinsic part of Norwegian children's life in preschool. Touchscreens and smart speakers are well-known examples (cf. McTear et al., 2016; The Norwegian Media Authority [Medietilsynet], 2018) of how the technological interfaces have changed and facilitated young children's use of digital tools (Nacher et al., 2015; Price et al., 2015). When digital

#### Edited by:

Sanna Raudaskoski, University of Tampere, Finland

#### Reviewed by:

Leena Kuure, University of Oulu, Finland Asta Cekaite, Linköping University, Sweden

> \*Correspondence: Pål Aarsand pal.aarsand@ntnu.no

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 01 February 2019 Accepted: 12 April 2019 Published: 22 May 2019

#### Citation:

Aarsand P (2019) Categorization Activities in Norwegian Preschools: Digital Tools in Identifying, Articulating, and Assessing. Front. Psychol. 10:973. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00973

**26**

tools have become part of Norwegian preschools, they have generated digital literacy practices that include a range of activities such as reading, listening, touching, adjusting, curating and producing symbols and signs (cf. Lafton, 2012; Leu et al., 2017). The social and material environment is inherent in local definitions of what it means to know something, and what is considered relevant knowledge can be seen as dynamic and changing (Aarsand and Melander, 2016; Cannon et al., 2018). This points out that the meaning of action, symbols and signs is situated and thus closely related to the context in which they appear (e.g., Goodwin, 1994; Kress, 2000). This also tells us that knowing how to act can be seen as a pragmatic resource, where children and adults use it according to how appropriate, meaningful and useful it is in the particular activity (Gillen and Hall, 2012; Aarsand and Bowden, 2019). Thus, being a digitally literate person means being a member of a community where one is able to read and produce relevant action in line with what is expected from the position one occupies at the appropriate time and place.

In the present text I will examine how children participate in teacher-initiated activities where digital media are used as tools. Drawing on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspectives (e.g., Schegloff, 1996; Goodwin, 2000), I will ask the question: how are digital literacy practices constituted in interaction? The focus is on how children participate in various categorization activities and what resources and strategies they use to differentiate between geometrical shapes and different feelings.

### DIGITAL LITERACY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Studies of digital literacy practices in preschools have shown how children and a preschool teacher use and interpret multimodal interactional resources in the production of shared understanding and meaning making of digital texts (Björk-Willén and Aronsson, 2014; Davidson et al., 2014, 2017; Bevemyr and Björk-Willén, 2016). In an Australian study of preschool children's use of YouTube, Davidson et al. (2014, 2017) have pointed out that digital literacy practices and meaning-making processes involve embodied interactional resources as well as online texts, thereby transgressing the online/offline dichotomy (see also Marsh, 2014).

Digital literacy activities can be seen as situated in the sense that how participants understand and deal with signs, icons, symbols, gestures, pointing, colors, and images is closely related to what, where, when, and together with whom these occur. Aarsand and Melander (2016) found in a study of Swedish children's digital literacy practices at home and at school that these activities encompass verbal, embodied, and social competencies. They also found that these competencies are accessible for learning in the interaction between adults and children by serving as norms and guidelines for what constitutes knowledgeable participation in media literacy activities. A study of Australian, Norwegian, and Swedish children's digital game playing at home, preschool, and afterschool (Danby et al., 2018) found that children collaborated with their peers to advance the game by using multiple strategies such as instructing each other, monitoring each other's action and problem solving (cf. Björk-Willén and Aronsson, 2014). Knowing how to participate in digital literacy activities at public venues, such as preschools, involves social competences where children learn from each other how to organize the activity, evaluate other participants' way of acting, understand what is happening and know how to work with the tools. Bearing this in mind, it has been argued that participating in digital literacy activities involves understanding, using and acting according to social norms and expectations (Davidson et al., 2017). Moreover, it has been found that social norms for what counts as the 'correct' way to talk about digital texts and experiences, and what counts as competence, are produced in social interaction. Here, Davidson et al. (2014) have found that preschool children are expected to understand and produce institutional ways of talking about digital texts and experiences.

The touchscreen has made other symbols than the alphabet important when it comes to using digital technologies. This means that reading and writing in the traditional linguistic sense are not the only ways to work with such devices. Lately, touch has become interesting to literacy researchers (e.g., Bezemer and Kress, 2014; Crescenzi et al., 2014; Nacher et al., 2015; Price et al., 2015). Price et al. (2015) have conducted a comparative study of touch-based interaction where they investigate the use of tablets in comparison to using paper when drawing/painting, and have found differences in how children use their fingers. Crescenzi et al. (2014) point out that the properties of the environment have implications for the type of touch that children use and how they use touch. They argue that the interface shapes young children's touch-based interaction. When the focus is on touch, what is interesting is how children deal with the interfaces, such as touchscreens, as well as the possible knowledge and skills that children develop through participating. Studies of young children and touch are intriguing because they show that embodied competence is a necessity for making use of touchscreens. However, these studies mainly focus on what children are able to do at a certain stage in their motoric development (Nacher et al., 2015; Price et al., 2015), thus they tend to approach touch as a question of individual and psychological development, not as a social activity (Aarsand and Bowden, 2019).

Interfaces such as the touchscreen require that the user has a visual competence in terms of interpreting, understanding and producing signs and symbols within a socio-cultural setting, a tactile competence in terms of touching, swiping and tapping, and an audio competence in terms of understanding and acting on verbal instructions and cues. In the present study of children's digital literacy practices, the social interaction and the organization of categorization activities are in focus. The study of social interaction includes looking into different modalities, such as talk, pointing, gaze, intonation, and other embodied actions in the pragmatic sense of meaning making (e.g., Goodwin, 2013).

# GUIDED PARTICIPATION AND PROFESSIONAL VISION

To study how children become competent users of digital tools I explore how they take part in activities where such tools are an integral part of them. This means that my main interest is not digital media per se, but practices where children use them as tools. To investigate such practices I will use two theoretical concepts: 'guided participation' (Rogoff, 2003) and 'professional vision' (Goodwin, 1994).

### Guided Participation

fpsyg-10-00973 May 20, 2019 Time: 17:34 # 3

Guided participation can be explained as 'varied ways that children learn as they participate in and are guided by the values and practices of their cultural communities' (emphasis in original) (Rogoff, 2003, pp. 283–284). Guided participation points out that competence is the outcome of participating in practices, here digital literacy practices in preschool, and where through talking, doing, and stance taking adults and peers display social and cultural references regarding how to use digital tools. The notion of guided participation includes interaction that is intended as instructional but also activities that go beyond intended instruction, such as teasing, assessing, and shaming. The social aspect underlined by guided participation actualizes such questions as what kind of participation, who, where, and when. What is a valid way of working with the tablet? How do children and adults demonstrate that they are digitally competent users in preschool?

### Professional Vision

To understand how people become qualified participants in different sociocultural practices it has been pointed out that we need to consider more than language in the linguistic sense. In his seminal paper 'Professional Vision' (1994), Charles Goodwin finds that the practice of seeing is the outcome of learning and being part of a community of practices. What we see when we look at a screen, watch a football match, or look at dirt on the ground differs depending on our experiences, education, occupation, age, position, gender, and so on. To identify an action, a symbol, a color or a particular shape as something specific is something that we learn. Goodwin uses the notion of 'professional vision' in studies of such professions as archeology and law enforcement to show how members of these professions have learnt to act in qualified ways by being part of a particular community of practices. He finds that archeologists use tools to identify certain colors in the dirt as proof of early settlements. Seen from an anthropological point of view, dirt is turned into an object of knowledge. 'Through the progressive development of, and apprenticeship within, diverse epistemic ecologies, communities invest their members with the resources required to understand each other in just the ways that make possible the accomplishment of ongoing, situated action' (Goodwin, 2013, p. 21). In short, we learn to look at things in culturally specific ways (Linell, 2009).

Similar to professionals, children in preschool have to learn a range of practices to be 'qualified' for school and society at large. This means that they participate in social practices where they have to identify, describe and act on phenomena in their surroundings in socially acceptable ways. This could be identifying someone as sad, or a sign acting as something that tells us what to do. The complexity of social life is transformed into categories that constitute how to be in preschool. According to Goodwin (1994, p. 606), 'An event being seen, a relevant object of knowledge, emerges through the interplay between a domain of scrutiny and a set of discursive practices being deployed within a specific activity' (emphasis in original). An object of knowledge may be shapes, forms, colors and expressions, for instance, it could be a traffic sign or a traffic light. These signs do not have a meaning in themselves, rather this meaning emerges through the interplay between a domain of scrutiny, which may be an object, an image or a movement, and a set of discursive practices that helps one to divide the domain of scrutiny by highlighting a figure on a background in that particular activity. Moreover, when a driver, a police officer and a transport researcher look at signs and traffic lights, they will most likely see and describe them differently.

Goodwin (1994) introduces three key aspects of professional vision: coding, highlighting, and representation. 'Coding' points to how within a certain practice a particular way of interpreting what is seen is used. Often, this is done by means of classification or coding schemes that help the user to structure the perception, for instance, to turn an object into a circle instead of seeing it as a football, or to see a green light as a symbol that allows us to cross the street. The coding schemes can be a 'standard' used in similar situations that help us to identify certain objects of knowledge. It could be argued that coding schemes control perception by giving the green light, when it appears by the road together with a yellow and red light, a particular meaning. 'Highlighting' points to the process whereby the viewer distinguishes between the figure and background, when a certain act, object, shape, or color is identified and displayed as something specific. Highlighting also refers to making something stand out, or to put it somewhat differently, something is made visible. To locate features of the phenomenon in question we could for instance point at something, or draw a line to make a distinction between the figure and its background. This last step involves what Goodwin calls the 'production and articulation of material representation.' He points to the interface between talk, writing practices, and tool use when producing verbal as well as material articulations (drawings, images, diagrams, tables, applications, and so on). The production of representations can be seen as a process where participants display how to act in qualified ways (or not).

In the present paper, Goodwin (1994) idea of how professionals see their surroundings in appropriate ways will be used as an analytical tool to scrutinize how through participating in adult-led activities children are placed in situations where they learn to see, interpret and act on their surroundings. I will use the concept of professional vision to discover how through instructions, norms, and values children are guided to see, understand and act as competent members of their society, and how digital tools are part of these processes.

## METHODOLOGY

fpsyg-10-00973 May 20, 2019 Time: 17:34 # 4

The present paper is part of the project Digital Tools in Early Childhood Education and Care. The data material consists of approximately 70 h of video recordings from three Norwegian preschools. During the fieldwork, two video cameras have been used, one camera followed an adult (the focus adult) during the day and one followed a child (the focus child). In total, 45 children and eight adults participated in the study. To avoid unnecessary focus on one particular child, we did not video-record the same child 2 days in a row. The recorded children were 5–6 years old and part of the 'school-starter' group, which means that they will be entering elementary school next fall.

I have selected two cases for analysis based on the following criteria: (1) there should be a reoccurring activity, (2) the participant constellations should differ (child–child and child– adult interaction), and (3) variation with regard to the digital tool used (tablets, smartboard, and smartphones). These criteria are seen as important for being able to say something about digital literacy practices in preschool by revealing variations when it comes to how these are socio-materially organized and accomplished in situ.

The main reason for choosing the present excerpts is that they show how digital literacy activities in ECEC vary in terms of social norms, digital tools, and social constellations. The excerpts have been transcribed according to conventions developed within conversation analysis (see **Appendix A**). Frame grabs are used to highlight analytically relevant embodied actions and the participants' orientations to the material environment. Frame grabs where faces are visible have been blurred to protect the anonymity of the participants. As the participants are Norwegian speakers, the excerpts have been translated into English. When it comes to ethical considerations, written informed consent was obtained from the preschool teachers and from the parents of the children for the purposes of research participation, as well as for the publication of data and images. The children were continuously informed during the fieldwork about the research project and their right to decide whether they wanted to participate or not (cf. Aarsand and Forsberg, 2010). The project has been approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data with respect to research ethics. Pseudonyms have been used for all participants.

In the analysis, focus is on the interactional resources (talk, text, images, moving images, music, and so on) that children orient to, and how digital tools become an integral part of their literacy practices. The analytical focus is on how the participants establish different participation frameworks (Goffman, 1974; Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004) by addressing the following question: how do children participate in categorization practices in preschool where digital tools are used?

# USING DIGITAL TOOLS IN CATEGORIZATION ACTIVITIES

Norwegian preschool children come together across social class, gender, and ethnicity lines (Statistics Norway [SSB], 2018), and the preschool is an arena where society communicates norms, values and what is expected of children to learn and master at a particular age (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training [UDIR], 2017). A key part of social and cultural life is to understand signs and symbols. They tell us how to act, but are also tools we use to categorize information. Categorizations are activities where objects, ideas, and theories are grouped to be used for particular purposes. This could be differentiating and grouping animals as mammals, or humans as women and men. Categorization is about using symbols and labels in ways that help us to create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing, and acting upon the world (Goodwin, 1994). In preschool, children are expected to learn the meaning of signs and symbols by participating in activities where they are used and made relevant (cf. Kress, 2000; Rogoff, 2003).

The two examples in this article focus on how children participate in two different categorization activities in preschools using digital tools. In the first example, the focus will be on how digital cameras work in the process of identifying and communicating geometrical shapes. In the second sample, the focus is on how a smartboard with applications works in the process of identifying and categorizing feelings.

#### Geometrical Seeing and Digital Cameras

In the Norwegian Framework plan for kindergarten (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training [UDIR], 2017), one of the learning areas is entitled 'Quantities, spaces, and shapes.' This area covers 'play and investigation involving comparison, sorting, placement, orientation, visualization, shapes, patterns, numbers, counting, and measuring' (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training [UDIR], 2017, p. 53). In the first example, I will examine how children participate in the categorization of geometrical shapes, which are sociocultural artifacts produced and sustained through this particular field within mathematics, by using a digital camera. Geometry can be seen as an established way of thinking, viewing and understanding our surroundings.

#### Demonstrating Geometrical Seeing

The teacher has just shown the children what geometrical shapes look like by holding up sheets of paper with different shapes, a circle, a rectangle, a square and a triangle, while also telling them the name of each shape. The children have been divided into groups of two where they are given a tablet or a smartphone and are told to take pictures of geometrical shapes in the classroom. When we enter the first excerpt for this example, Stefan and June are standing in the middle of the room looking around.

#### Excerpt 1a

fpsyg-10-00973 May 20, 2019 Time: 17:34 # 5


<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the adult and the parents of the children for publication of transcriptions of discourse data.

Stefanpasses the tablet to Jon (line 1), who takes it and asks if he wants him to take a picture. Jon accepts the request and starts talking out loud about what he is doing. In this way he draws attention to what he is doing, taking a picture, and how he does it. He has to find a good motif that fits the task given to the children and draws attention to 'the clock' (line 5). However, identifying a good motif is not enough, it also needs to be categorized as having a certain shape. Here, they are supposed to use the coding schemes that were introduced to them before they started this activity. Jon asks what the shape of the clock is, but June does not seem to focus on Jon's demonstration, who is looking at June and addressing her (line 5). Jon addresses June once more, points toward the clock with the tablet in his hands and establishes a joint focus of attention (line 7). He then highlights the clock as a relevant object; it becomes an object that is transformed into a circle. This is even underlined by the fact that Jon takes a picture of the clock. Before the demonstration is finished, Jon asks for the name of the shape and Noah answers 'circle' (line 11). The answer is confirmed by the teacher before he looks at the picture on the tablet and shows it to Stefan who concludes that it is 'kind of dark' (line 18). Put briefly, Jon demonstrates that identifying geometrical shapes is not enough, they should also be named correctly and documented as visible on the device. Asking 'how is the picture' is an invitation to assess the 'visual articulation' of the shape, the picture. Being too dark may be an argument for taking a new picture. The digital camera makes it possible to create and recreate a visual articulation until one is satisfied. Moreover, Jon demonstrates and establishes a procedure that tells the children how to solve the task and how this includes using the digital camera correctly.

#### Making Visual Articulations

The children have been told what different geometrical shapes look like and the preschool teacher has demonstrated how to identify and highlight these shapes in the classroom. Part of this work concerns the production and articulation of a representation, the image. In the next excerpt, the children's attention will be on how they produce a representation of geometrical shapes. Ida and Nils are standing in front of a table with several objects on it.


Participants<sup>∗</sup> : IDA and NILS


<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the parents of the children for publication of transcriptions of discourse data.

Ida points at a box simultaneously as she says 'there↑' (line 1) indicating that she has identified something that they are looking for. Nils agrees with Ida and pulls the box out and arranges it on the table (line 2), which can be seen as a way of highlighting

the geometrical shape of the object. This arrangement makes it easier to see and take a picture of the geometrical shape. Ida tries to take a picture of the box with the smartphone. Here, both Ida and Nils look at the object (the box) through the screen on the smartphone. The presumed picture is not satisfying and Nils asks her to move back a bit, which she does. By backing a few steps she is able to get the whole box on the screen. During this sequence, Nils looks at the screen and approves of Ida's use of the camera 'like that (.) that was nice' (line 6), before she finally takes the picture. Moreover, in concert, they coordinate their bodies and the camera to create a representation of the object.

When they move to the next object, we see the same procedure once more; Ida identifies a possible shape and directs their attention to it by saying the name out loud, 'the hou↑se' simultaneously as she points the camera at it (line 8). Nils responds by repeating 'the house' (line 9) and thereby confirms that they have a joint focus of attention and an agreement of what has a valid shape. Both are looking at the screen at the same time as Ida works on getting the object in focus before she takes a picture (line 10). When this has been achieved, Nils aligns once more with Ida's choice to photograph the house by saying 'like that' before he asks to see the picture (line 12).

Ida gazes around the room before her attention is drawn to another object (line 13), a Lego pyramid. She moves over to the shelf and takes the object down. Nils has not yet seen the object, but moves over to the shelf with the camera and points it at the object (line 15). During this sequence, Nils looks at the object through the screen and identifies it is as 'the peak' that he made (line 17). Ida arranges the object in a way that makes Nils see the pyramid from above and he says 'a square' (line 19). This is the first time that they actually verbally articulate what they see using a geometrical term. Usually, there are several potential geometrical shapes present in one and the same object. In this case, they could have chosen to highlight a triangle, however, Nils refers to what he sees through the smartphone, which is a square.

This excerpt shows how the children use geometrical shapes as a code to highlight the geometrical shapes in the objects they see. The digital camera is an essential tool when creating representations of the geometrical shapes. To make a representation they have to identify and highlight it in a way that makes it possible to see a figure on a background, and they have to be able to articulate and communicate this figure. To do this, they need to create a representation that is both visible and representative of the particular geometrical shape that they want to display. Taking pictures of the object is one way of articulating the geometrical shapes, and this can be seen as visual articulation. The children display clear ideas about what a good 'visual articulation' of the object looks like, how to arrange the object so that the whole shape appears on the screen and how to take a good a clear picture. Furthermore, we can also see how the children view the object through the screen from the very beginning, making it fit within the digital format that the camera suggests. Moreover, the main challenge seems to refer to being able to visually articulate the shape. Here, the camera is a tool that makes visual articulation possible but it also restricts what can be turned into an example of a geometrical shape. Being successful in the categorization of geometrical shapes indirectly becomes a question of knowing how to use the digital camera.

#### Assessing Articulation/Categorization

Identifying and visually articulating the different geometrical shapes is an important part of learning geometry, but this is not enough. It is also important to name and articulate the shapes verbally.

After the children have walked around in the preschool taking pictures of different shapes, they are gathered around a table in a corner of the room. The preschool teachers have collected the devices (smartphones and tablets) and they are now looking through the pictures that the children have taken. They are seated around a table on small chairs while the teachers are seated at the head of the table.

Excerpt 1c

Participants<sup>∗</sup> : STEFAN, JUNE, and the preschool teachers: Sara and Marte


<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the adults and the parents of the children for publication of transcriptions of discourse data and images.

Sara holds up the tablet and shows a picture of a computer screen to the group while simultaneously asking June if she is the one who has taken the picture. By addressing June, she makes her potentially responsible for the picture. By showing the picture to the whole group, Sara has established a joint focus of attention where she tells the children that this is what they will be talking about now. June confirms that she has taken the picture, which is followed by Sara asking her what shape the object is (line 3). June answers that the object in the picture is the shape of a square (line 4). This is not

exactly the answer that Sara was looking for so Marte (another preschool teacher) specifies the question by asking what kind of square, thereby telling the children that there are different types. June holds up a piece of paper that has the shape of a rectangle and says 'like this' (line 6). This piece of paper was used when the preschool teachers introduced the children to the task. But, categorizing the square by saying 'like this' (line 6), even when she displays a piece of paper with the correct shape, is not considered good enough. The child also needs to name it correctly (line 7). When June finally says quietly 'rectangle' (line 9), both Marte and Sara confirm that she has given the correct answer.

The whole sequence can be seen as an assessment of June's competence with respect to geometrical shapes. She is expected to demonstrate through visual and verbal articulation that she is able to identify and present a digital representation of the shape. In addition to this, she is expected to be able to talk about shapes using correct geometrical terms. Public assessment like this can be seen as guided participation where the children observe how the preschool teacher talks to their peers about different squares, triangles and circles, and the naming of these, about what is satisfactory visual articulation and what is considered to be a picture that is suitable for discussing in these terms. Moreover, the norm of how to use digital cameras and what is considered to be a good enough picture is communicated through public assessment and the joint visible focus of attention.

# Categorizing Thoughts and Feelings Using the Smartboard

In the next example, the focus is on how this preschool works on developing children's social competences. It could be argued that social competence is something that people learn by being together with others, participating in social activities, such as play, and dealing with social expectations (cf. Hutchby and Morran-Ellis, 1998). The focus here is on how preschool children participate in categorization of feelings by looking at images and drawings of children in various situations on a smartboard in a teacher-led activity. The application 'Green thoughts – happy children' that is used here is described as a 'psychological first-aid kit' that claims to train and stimulate children in how to talk about thoughts and feelings (Raknes, 2014). The application is part of the learning resource 'Salaby'<sup>1</sup> .

#### Differing Between Red and Green Thoughts

In the first excerpt, the analytical gaze will be directed at how the preschool teacher introduces the codes 'green' and 'red' to label thoughts. The group consists of seven children and two adults. They are located in a room with a table, a smartboard in the front and a computer that is connected to it. The preschool teacher is seated next to the smartboard in front of the computer while the children are seated around the table. The lights are turned off, the door to the corridor is closed. They have just started the 'Green thoughts – happy children' application and the preschool teacher has told the children that they will be entering a preschool called 'Anthill.'

#### Excerpt 2a

Participants<sup>∗</sup> : SOFIE, EMIL, Liz (preschool teacher), and sb (smartboard)


<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the adult and the parents of the children for publication of transcriptions of discourse data and images.

The preschool teacher directs the children's attention to a drawing of a smiling green teddy bear by pointing at it and asking if they see it (line 1), thereby establishing a joint focus of attention. The children answer in chorus that they have identified it and thereby confirm this. Then the preschool teacher says: 'I believe that he's sort of ha:ppy thoughts' (line 3), thereby relating the green teddy bear to happy thoughts. However, using the word 'believe' makes this symbol ambivalent and indicates that it could be interpreted differently. Then the preschool teacher slowly moves her index finger over to a red teddy bear (with a regular face), and Emil immediately claims 'that one is not having nice thoughts' (line 5). The preschool teacher approves Emil's statement by saying 'no he's a bit red' (line 6) at the same time as she draws a circle around the red teddy bear and highlights which one they are talking about. Thus, she confirms that there is a connection between the red teddy bear and not having nice thoughts. The relation is not made explicit by the preschool teacher, in fact she says 'maybe he is red thoughts' (line 6), but what these thoughts are is not described nor talked about. However, by pointing at, circling in and pointing out the color of the teddy bear that she is talking about, she introduces what could be called a visual code. This code consists of two distinct colors, green and red, which represent two categories of thoughts, 'happy' and 'not so nice.' When looking at pictures of children in interaction in the upcoming part of the application,

<sup>1</sup>www.salaby.no

these two possibilities can be identified and highlighted with this visual code. Using the code, the children have to choose just one of the categories when describing the thoughts/feelings of the person(s) in the picture.

#### Identifying and Categorizing Feelings

After the children have been introduced to the 'visual code' and have watched an animated film about the preschool called Anthill, they are invited to go up to the smartboard one at a time to solve the task: 'How do the children feel?' The task is to connect a particular feeling to a graphic representation, a drawing of a child. The children have to solve the task in front of the class, which means that how they deal with the task is visible to the entire group. In terms of learning, this can be seen as demonstrating to the rest of the class how to identify and label feelings.

In Excerpt 2b, Anne has come up to the smartboard and the teacher has started the application. First, the computer names a feeling, second, Anne has to choose one out of two drawings of a person who symbolizes this feeling, and finally, the computer assesses Anne's answers. The task is to identify the 'correct' representation. It is important to note that there is a technical glitch with the smartboard; it does not respond to touch on its icons and symbols. For this reason, the teacher uses the mouse on the computer to maneuvre on the touchscreen.

#### Excerpt 2b

Participants<sup>∗</sup> : ANNE and Liz (pre-school teacher) and sb (smartboard)




<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the adult and the parents of the child for publication of transcriptions of discourse data and images.

Two drawings appear on the screen and the smartboard states out loud 'Roald is scared' (line 1). Anne starts by looking at both pictures before she points at the picture to the right and touches the screen. In fact, Anne keeps her finger on the touchscreen until the preschool teacher moves the cursor to the drawing and clicks on it (lines 3–4). Thus, she demonstrates that she knows how the touchscreen works and that she has to keep her finger on the screen until the teacher clicks on the drawing because the screen does not work as it should. By keeping her finger on the screen, she makes sure that the preschool teacher sees and clicks on the drawing she has pointed to. After the preschool teacher has clicked on the drawing, the smartboard says 'scared' simultaneously as it assesses the answer (line 7). The assessment appears as a smiling face that pops up on the right-hand side of the screen. The screen shows us that she has a total of three smiling faces. The assessment is followed by the preschool teacher, who lowers her voice and aligns with the application (line 8).

In the excerpt here the same procedure occurs twice more. The child is presented to a feeling, scared (line 1), sad (line 9), and proud (line 15). Each time, the child is given two images to choose between, either X or Y, followed by an assessment made by the application, given as a smiling face. When the task has been fulfilled and Anne has collected five smiling faces, a dancing green teddy bear appears on the screen simultaneously as we hear a voice saying 'Hurray↑ now you were clever' (line 21). As we remember from the introduction to the 'Green thoughts – happy children' application, the green teddy bear represents

happy thoughts, thereby recycling the assessment displayed by the smiling faces. The preschool teacher aligns with this assessment as well.

All in all, we can see how the application structures the activity following an IRE (initiative-response-evaluation) pattern (cf. Mehan, 1979). It starts by addressing the child, then waiting for an answer where the child chooses between two predefined images and then assessing the answer. The question of identifying feelings becomes a question where the child has an either/or option. The tool thus also restricts which feelings can be talked about, and even presumes that the feeling in question, for instance 'proud,' has a universal template. The feeling is not turned into a question of highlighting what makes it different from the others, nor does the child need to display how to use the concepts that describe emotions. During this sequence, the preschool teacher only gives minimal responses to Anne, which can be seen as an alignment with how the application accomplishes the activity. On a speculative note, it could be critically discussed whether or not the application restricts how to identify, articulate, and talk about feelings in preschool.

#### Assessment and Categorization Trouble

The smartboard obviously matters when it comes to how children learn to see, categorize and articulate feelings. The excerpt above shows us that the design of the application restricted a possible discussion of feelings because it presented predefined templates where the children were to choose one of two options.

The 'green thoughts – happy children' application has several types of tasks and I will now turn my focus to how Stefan tries to solve the task 'My feelings.' The task is structured into two parts. First, 'when someone does X to you, how do you feel?' which should be categorized as either a green or a red feeling. Second, when the child has chosen green or red, s/he has to rate the strength of this feeling on a four-grade scale. In the next excerpt we will see how Stefan gets into trouble when he is asked to categorize feelings.

Excerpt 2c

Participants<sup>∗</sup> : STEFAN, ANNE, Karen (preschool teacher), and sb (smartboard)



<sup>∗</sup>Written and informed consent was obtained from the adult and the parents of the child for publication of transcriptions of discourse data and images.

The computer asks: 'when somebody pulls my hair' (line 1). Stefan looks at the screen but does not answer. After a rather long pause, 2.3 s, the preschool teacher reformulates the question and asks: what feeling do we get when somebody pulls our hair? Stefan walks up to the smartboard and points first at the red teddy bear before he changes his mind and points to the green one. The preschool teacher's assessment is delivered as a question in which she asks if he becomes happy. According to the preschool teacher, Stefan did not use the visual code to highlight and categorize the feeling correctly the first time. This leads Stefan to point to the red teddy bear once more while at the same time looking at the preschool teacher.

After Stefan has chosen the red teddy bear for the second time, the preschool teacher suggests that he feels 'sad,' which is confirmed by Stefan (line 8). It could be argued that the opposite of happy is sad. Thus, a dichotomy has been established, if you are not happy then you are sad. The preschool teacher then presses the red teddy bear on the screen and the computer says loudly 'angry' (line 9). The label angry is repeated and confirmed by the teacher (line 10) and Stefan aligns with her (line 11). In this way the feelings sad and angry fall into the same category. According to the teacher's reaction, it seems important to be able to categorize feelings in terms of green and red, but it does not seem important how the feelings are more precisely labeled; sadness and anger are both possible. Red and green as categories of feelings are in the best case approximate. Note that green and red were originally introduced as labels of thoughts, not labels of feelings (see Excerpt 2a).

What is seen in the episode above is that the category red, which in the introduction part of this lesson was explained as 'not nice thoughts,' embraces both the feelings sad and angry. It could be argued that the teacher approves that the categories red and green can be used on a range of different feelings and that several of these feelings are labeled as 'not nice' (Excerpt 2a). Moreover, it is added that being angry or sad is not nice. But being able to choose between red and green, the children also need to know how to work with the digital equipment. In the example, Stefan demonstrates that

he knows that he has to listen to the instructions given by the application (audio competence), and that he has to press the screen to give an answer (visual and tactile competence). He even knows how to handle the complementary instructions given by the teacher (social norms and expectations). In contrast to highlighting and categorization of geometrical shapes using digital cameras in peer groups, here we see how there is restricted room for discussions on how to highlight the feeling due to the establishment of the dichotomy and the immediate assessment.

## DIGITAL LITERACIES IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

Knowing how to work with digital tools is taken for granted in a wide range of activities in the everyday life of children. In the present study, I have used the notion of guided participation and professional vision to scrutinize the use of digital cameras and smartboards to see how these taken-forgranted technologies are tools that transform and influence how children learn to think and act as members of a particular socio-cultural practice. By examining the categorization practice, I have shown how children are introduced to two different symbol systems, representing geometrical shapes and feelings (thoughts), in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing, and acting upon the world (cf. Goodwin, 1994). Being a preschool child means being able to participate in various digital literacy activities where the main purpose is not necessarily about working with digital tools (cf. Pink and Mackley, 2013), rather this competence becomes a condition for solving the primary task.

We have seen here how digital cameras and smartboards work as tools used by children who have been taught to apply symbol systems to describe and understand their surroundings, also called 'professional' visions. In the first example, the children worked on creating a visual representation using the digital camera. How to use the camera is taken for granted, no instruction is given and the children are responsible for solving this on their own. Here, we saw how they struggle to get the object in focus and we saw that this work was guided by social and cultural norms as to what a picture is supposed to look like in terms of light and distance. The cultural norms are produced and reproduced not only according to the teacher's demonstration of how to highlight and visually articulate the geometrical forms, but also by cooperating on taking pictures and through public assessment where the participants looked at and talked about what they saw in the pictures. The children also displayed that the practice of taking pictures using a digital camera includes taking several pictures of the same object. Interestingly, when searching for possible objects for a picture, they viewed their surroundings through the screen on the camera (cell phone or tablet). Objects that were too small or too big to be seen on the screen were not considered as a potential geometrical shape.

In the second example, we saw how children dealt with categorization of feelings by solving tasks within the learning resource 'Green thoughts – happy children.' In this example as well, how to deal with digital technology is taken for granted. The instructions are given verbally by the application and the child presses the icons and symbols on the smartboard. Because of a technical glitch, the children even coordinated their choices with the preschool teacher who had to complete them by means of the computer. Immediately after the children had decided to categorize a feeling and pressed the symbol, they received feedback. The way these applications are constructed, there are only two options and only one 'correct' answer. The children proved themselves to be competent users of smartboards and applications like 'Green thoughts – happy children.' However, the digital tool as it is used in the preschool practice becomes a matter of turning feelings/thoughts into an either/or question. Even though there seems to be disagreement between the child, preschool teacher and the application, there is no discussion that moves beyond the either/or question.

Using digital cameras and smartboards also means that bodily actions are important. In contrast to studies on touchscreens that mainly have focused on what children are able to do at a certain stage in their motoric development (Nacher et al., 2015; Price et al., 2015), the present study has shown how touch is just one among several embodied actions that are used in the social organization of digital literacy activities simultaneously. This can then be seen as an argument for a multimodal approach when investigating such activities. We saw how the children have to physically highlight the figure that they want to photograph, and they have to adjust their position with the camera to the situation at hand to find the best way of taking the picture. We also saw that the body is important in using the smartboard. As users, the children had to locate themselves to see the whole screen, they had to be able to differentiate between pointing at and pressing a symbol and, in the particular case that we witnessed, they had to coordinate their bodily actions with the teacher who then completed their choices.

All in all, categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that help children to create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing, and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures, and socialites that are part of these categorization practices, they are part of how we teach children to experience, interpret, understand, and act in the world. Then, digital literacy can be seen as a pragmatic resource learned and used as children participate in everyday activities and where digital tools are inseparable from these. However, different technologies created different conditions for the children's participation. Peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets (cf. Danby et al., 2018), while when using non-mobile technologies, like smartboards, it is shown that the activities were structured more as 'classic' classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard.

Taking an ethnomethodological/conversation analytical approach to digital literacy activities in situ yields

new understanding of social interactions when using digital tools in everyday activities in Early Childhood Education and Care. The detailed analysis displays how children develop their 'professional' vision through such social activities as categorization practices where they adjust their action to norms and expectations (cf. Davidson et al., 2014, 2017). The social organization of the categorization activities was partly related to the digital tools that were used. Collaboration and social interaction were an important part of solving the task they faced. While this is not a new finding (e.g., Björk-Willén and Aronsson, 2014; Danby et al., 2018), the present paper's findings show how digital tools are integrated in the creation of knowing and socially organized ways of seeing and understanding, and that digital tools are not neutral and non-ideological mediators in these processes.

### ETHICS STATEMENT

The project has been approved by the Norwegian Center for Research Data.

Informed consent has been retrieved from staff in the preschool and the participating children's parents. They have

#### REFERENCES


got written information about the project, the purpose and how this will influence on their children's life in the preschool while doing the fieldwork. They have been informed of the possibility to withdraw at any moment from the project without any consequences. The children have been orally informed about the project and were given the opportunity to say no if they did not want to participate. Since we see consent as something that is (re)negotiated in the meeting with the children during our fieldwork, we have avoided video recording of children that in one way or the other signalized that they did not feel comfortable being observed.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

#### FUNDING

This study was supported by Norwegian University of Science and Technology.



**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Aarsand. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# APPENDIX A

fpsyg-10-00973 May 20, 2019 Time: 17:34 # 13

#### TABLE A1 | Transcription conventions adapted from Jefferson (2004).


# Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children's Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States

#### Karen Gainer Sirota\*

Department of Human Development, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, United States

#### Edited by:

Pirkko Liisa Raudaskoski, Aalborg University, Denmark

#### Reviewed by:

Melisa Stevanovic, University of Helsinki, Finland Sawa Senzaki, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, United States

> \*Correspondence: Karen Gainer Sirota Karen.Sirota@csulb.edu

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 02 February 2019 Accepted: 07 June 2019 Published: 26 June 2019

#### Citation:

Sirota KG (2019) Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children's Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States. Front. Psychol. 10:1456. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01456 An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children's lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world at hand. This article brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. Illustrative examples emanate from a videotaped corpus of naturalistic interactional data that document the daily lives of 32 ethnically diverse U.S. middle-class families who reside in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region. The article employs discourse and narrative analysis to examine how children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis emphasizes how implicit components of caregivers' interactions with children (i.e., gesture, gaze, facial expression) intertwine with explicit, verbal communication to constitute intricately layered affective messages that shape the evaluative frames through which children interpret, display, and respond to emotions. The article identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, "pep talks" and "time outs," that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally preferred ways. Study findings suggest that parental communications conveying praise and approval—or conversely indexing disapproval—toward children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this cultural milieu as children are mentored into culturally meaningful emotional management techniques. The article highlights how children actively employ semiotic socio-communicative resources and it closely traces their sense-making processes in tandem with their discursive contributions to the moment-by-moment interaction. It argues that emotion, morality, and interpersonal relations are critical in shaping children's acquisition of consensually validated ways of perceiving, feeling, and responding to the phenomena they encounter in their day-to-day lives. This perspective aims toward contextualized understandings that render plausible connections between local contexts of everyday action and broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others.

Keywords: children, culture, emotion, family, language, morality, socialization

# INTRODUCTION

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An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children's lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world. The current study brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. The article examines how U.S. middle-class children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, "pep talks" and "time outs," that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally and socially preferred ways. Study findings indicate that parental communications that convey approval and praise—or, conversely, index disapproval—toward children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this U.S. middleclass cultural milieu. The article explores how parents employ emotions to convey and model culturally salient moral values to children. It also addresses how these childrearing practices socialize children into culturally pertinent moral norms and techniques of emotion expression and regulation. It further proposes that these two components of socialization go handin-hand and occur in tandem with one another. The emotional meaning and salience of the parent-child relationship thus shape the motivational and contextual frame in which this socialization unfolds.

## Morality and Emotion in Everyday Life

Endeavors to arrive at contextualized understandings about how morality is shaped and enacted amidst everyday life circumstances, in situ, have come to the fore in recent years as counterpoints to the relatively abstract, circumscribed approaches that have guided, in large measure, contemporary social scientific outlooks about ethics and morality, such as those that draw on fixed developmental sequences (e.g., Piaget, 1932; Kohlberg, 1981); universal psychological and/or social principles (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Turiel, 1983); structurally determined normative ideals (e.g., Parsons, 1951; Habermas, 1990); institutionally or culturally endorsed rituals and customs (e.g., Durkheim, 1965; Goffman, 1967); or philosophically derived, ubiquitous ethical "goods" (e.g., Rawls, 2001; MacIntyre, 2007).

In contrast, recent explorations in the arenas of linguistic, medical, and psychological anthropology, cultural and discursive psychology, and conversation analysis point to the utility of approaching the study of morality as it is situated and negotiated amid the vicissitudes of everyday practice (e.g., Shweder and Much, 1991; Bergmann, 1998; Briggs, 1998; Kleinman, 1998; Rydstrøm, 2003; Shweder, 2003, 2012; Sterponi, 2003, 2009; Fung, 2006; Goodwin, 2006; Kleinman, 2006; Zigon, 2007, 2014; Parish, 2008, 2014; Ochs and Izquierdo, 2009; Lambek, 2010; Sirota, 2010a; Throop, 2010, 2014; Heritage, 2011; Stivers et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2012; Demuth, 2013; Fassin, 2013; Mattingly, 2013, 2014; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013b; Takada, 2013; Desjarlais, 2014; Garcia, 2014; Willen, 2014; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018). Such fine-grained, culturally attuned analyses provide nuanced, on-the-ground portrayals of people's pragmatic engagements in "local moral worlds" (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1991, p. 277) in which people stand to differentially gain or lose in matters that involve closely held values, pursuits, relationships, ideas, material conditions, and the like. This research sheds light on the reciprocal co-constitutive processes via which individuals' moral choices, experiences, and outlooks are cultivated and shaped in dynamic interaction with sociocultural norms. In stressing the importance of deriving contextualized and ecologically valid understandings about morality, cultural psychologist and anthropologist Shweder (2012) argues for the importance of cross-cultural descriptive fieldwork that explores the local nuances of moral precepts, judgments, and views. Moral endeavors are lodged, and transpire, within specific interactional contexts, temporal trajectories, cultural settings, and socio-political circumstances (Goodwin, 2006). Individuals' responsibilities, virtues, rights, transgressions, accomplishments, and trajectories of conflict or cooperation are thus calibrated and attuned in dialogue with others. It is therefore crucial to attend to how morality is enacted and takes shape in real world surroundings and situations. As such, "morality is not transcendent, but always embedded in the need to sustain relations with others" (Lutz, 1988, p. 77).

The perspectives outlined above inform the approach I adopt in this article to the study of moral discourse and moral action. I also take inspiration from insights provided by anthropologist Zigon (2014) regarding the salience of contextualized, processoriented inquiry into human moralities as they are lived and transacted amid the contingencies, ambiguities, and uncertainties of day-to-day life. Zigon proposes an ontological standpoint, adapted from Heidegger (1996), which construes "being and the world as coeval" (Zigon, 2014, p. 20; see also Evens, 2005). On this view, human actors are "always already entangled in a multiplicity . . . of relationships that deeply matter for their very existence as subjects" (Zigon, 2014, pp. 21–22). These existential conditions, suggests Zigon, set the stage for an expansive web of meaningful engagements in which the ethical projects of self and others hold

pertinence for one another as each party actively engages past, present, and future possibilities, prohibitions, imaginaries, and constraints. "Morally being-in-the-world," Zigon further notes, entails "nonconscious embodied modes of moral life" as well as moments of conscious ethical reflection that hold transformative potential (Zigon, 2014, pp. 24, 18).

These morally laden communicative processes are simultaneously self-shaping and relational. Parish (2014), for example, draws attention to the intersubjective contours of morality. Moral transactions are thus negotiated in the "space between persons" (Parish, 2014, p. 33). Moreover, they are coupled with the existential challenges of humanely responding to other persons, and of meaningfully grappling with the presence of others in ways that have "experiential and emotional force" (Parish, 2014, p. 37). In their cross-cultural language socialization study of moral responsibility among Samoan, Peruvian Matsigenka, and middle-class Los Angeles, California, families, anthropologists Ochs and Izquierdo (2009, p. 391) stress the import of socializing and supporting children's proclivities for "active(ly) turning toward the other" so as to foster their "awareness of and responsiveness to others' needs and desires." Morally accountable actions, choices, and calibrations yield consequential relational effects that involve affiliation, cooperation, and alignment with others, as well as disagreement, resistance, and power asymmetries vis-à-vis social relationships (Stivers et al., 2011).

Moral encounters in daily life transpire within communicative contexts that call upon co-participants to intelligibly utilize, recognize, and interpret multimodal linguistic and paralinguistic cues so as to orchestrate mutually understood, culturally valued ways of being, believing, and behaving. Trevarthen (2011, p. 123) emphasizes the crucial role of emotion in establishing and negotiating intersubjectively shared meanings, principles, and values. It is "human feelings," Trevarthen observes, "that give aesthetic appraisal of things and events, and moral appraisal of others' actions." From their earliest moments as newborns, children are provided with a richly elaborated set of cultural resources that interpretively frame their subjectively experienced emotions as well as the emotions they observe in others (Demuth, 2013, p. 41). As such, children are mentored into culturally pertinent techniques of heeding and deriving meaning from the emotions of self and others. Culturally elaborated emotional experiences, expressions, and responses index and convey moral stances about what is culturally valued or denigrated, normative or deviant, decorous or improper, soothing or abrasive, and so on (Sirota, 2018). Culturally mediated "socializing emotions" (Röttger-Rössler et al., 2016) conveyed in conjunction with emotionally charged childrearing practices—such as shaming, praising, teasing, frustrating, admiring, adoring, frightening, and disapproving—communicate and reinforce memorable lessons to children about preferred values, norms, dispositions, and tastes (e.g., Briggs, 1970, 1998; Miller, 1982; Miller and Sperry, 1987; Fung, 1999; Quinn, 2005; Willhinganz and Wingard, 2005; Sirota, 2010a; Miller et al., 2012; Röttger-Rössler et al., 2016). Goodwin and Cekaite (2018, p. 122) call attention to the multimodal, embodied components of such socioemotional communications between children and caregivers, which are constituted through an "interactive sensorium" that comprises various components of speech, such as vocal content, quality, and prosody, yet also encompasses haptic, corporeal characteristics such as gesture, gaze, touch, and bodily positioning. These contemporary insights about the pertinence of interactional micro-processes in transmitting culturally valued ways of understanding and responding to the world-at-hand are prefigured and supported by the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and her collaborators (e.g., Bateson and Mead, 1942; Mead and Macgregor, 1951; also see Bateson, 1972), whose closely detailed ethnographic observations and photographic analyses highlight the interactional relations among affective, communicative, sensorimotoric, and interpersonal aspects of children's cultural learning.

The approach adopted in this article regards cultural learning as a situated activity that involves participation in locally unfolding sequences of interaction that transpire in conjunction with socioculturally informed "communities of practice," such as nuclear and extended family constellations, peer groups, schools, and religious congregations, among others (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Erickson, 2002). Psychologist and educator (Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff et al., 2018) emphasizes that "learning and development occur in the process of people's participation in the activities and events of their cultural communities" (Rogoff et al., 2018, p. 6). However, it is crucial to note that cultural communities are not uniformly homogenous; rather they entail intracultural variation among community members (Strauss and Quinn, 1997; Strauss, 2012; D'Andrade, 2018; Quinn et al., 2018). Moreover, an individual may be part of multiple communities of practice, concurrently and/or successively across various points in the life course. Thus the development of particularized cultural competencies, values, identities, and worldviews is contingent upon which distinctive communities of practice an individual encounters as well as on the particularized fashion that each community of practice encourages "apprenticelike learning of certain patterns of conducting everyday life" (Erickson, 2002, p. 302).

Significantly, as well, various cultural communities differ in how they formulate and ascribe meaning, purpose, and value to biologically rooted emotional states and inclinations. The current study follows cultural psychologist Miller and colleagues (e.g., Miller and Sperry, 1987; Miller et al., 2007, 2012) in positing that emotion is neither solely nor unequivocally biological in nature; emotion is also mediated by—and responsive to—sociocultural norms. For example, emotions may be hypocognized or hypercognized in conjunction with culturally conditioned patterns of attentional focus that involve perception, attribution, lexicalization, and/or interpretation of feeling states (Levy, 1973, 1984). Also of note are culturally informed "feeling rules" (Hochschild, 1979, 2012) that tacitly and explicitly guide "who may feel which emotions when, with which intensity, and in front of whom they should be expressed or suppressed" (Röttger-Rössler et al., 2016, p. 187). "Children's developing expression of emotions," Miller and Sperry (1987, p. 2) likewise propose, "is influenced by the culturally patterned assumptions about emotional life that parents intentionally and unintentionally communicate to them." For example, cultural psychologist Fung et al. (2004) call attention to the contrasting cultural styles of emotion and morality into which young European-American and Taiwanese children are socialized through personal storytelling with their parents. Moral transgressions of Taiwanese children are highlighted and made emotionally salient through personal stories that inculcate feelings of shame about said transgressions. By comparison, European-American middle-class children are narratively positioned so as to valorize children's feelings of self-affirmation and selfesteem. In a related vein, psychocultural anthropologist Briggs (2000, p. 160) emphasizes that, "the repertoire of emotions is not the same the world over." Rather, emotions and their meanings are always embedded within, and contingent upon, the contexts in which they arise and take shape. Emotional meanings and purposes, Briggs (2000), pp. 160–161) suggests, are lodged within associative webs that draw upon and encompass community members' past, present, and future values, priorities, and conceptions about human nature and the bounds of proper comportment.

Briggs (1970), Briggs (1998, p. 207); Briggs (2000), Briggs (2008) ethnographic research among Inuit children and families examines how children learn to puzzle out, engage, and reconfigure "labyrinths of meaning" in which emotion and morality are at stake, and in which socially preferred attitudes, emotions, and behaviors intertwine in culturally coherent ways. Briggs (1998, p. 203) research attunes us to important questions about the type of work emotions do in day-to-day social life. One such query is posed by Briggs (1998, p. 204): What kinds of experiences foster, support, or transform cultural "patterns of thinking, feeling, and valuing?" Furthermore, how—and what do children learn about culturally configured emotions that potentially ease social relations or, alternatively, draw people apart? I take up these questions in the remainder of this article through an examination of two culturally recognized U.S. middle-class childrearing practices that are evident in the CELF project's research data: "pep talks" and "time outs," as each are colloquially termed. Both practices are aimed toward cultivating children's ability to restore their emotional equilibrium following a perturbation due to untoward adversity or distress. The data analysis that follows illustrates how these practices of U.S. middle-class family life play a role in mentoring children's accountability to others by encouraging them to manage their emotions, as well as actions that flow from these emotions, in culturally and socially preferred ways.

# MATERIALS AND METHODS

# Research Aim, Recruitment, and Participants

The research data analyzed in this study are part of a larger data set collected between the years of 2002 and 2005 by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF). The CELF research project aims to shed light on the socio-communicative processes and interactional structuring of U.S. middle-class dual earner families by closely documenting the daily activities and routines of 32 ethnically diverse, middle-class dual earner families residing in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, California.

Participating families were recruited via informational fliers that were distributed in local schools as well as through advertisements in community newspapers. Limited snowball sampling was also employed. Several families (n = 4) were thus recruited to the study by word of mouth after learning about the research from CELF project participants who were their neighbors or friends. Research parameters necessitated that families met all of the following criteria for inclusion in the study: (1) two parenting adults, each of whom worked at least 30 h weekly outside the home; (2) two or three children, at least one of whom was between 7- and 12-years of age; (3) self-identified middle-class status that included owning (or holding a mortgage on) a single-family home. Each family received financial compensation (\$1,000 U.S.) for their study participation.

The ethnic diversity of participating CELF families approximated, and roughly mirrored, the diverse demographic composition of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan region. Parenting adults who participated in the CELF research study self-identified as follows: Hispanic (6%); African American (8%); Asian and South Asian (14%); Caucasian Non-Hispanic (72%). CELF mothers ranged between 32 and 50 years of age (mean = 40 years). By comparison, CELF fathers' ages ranged from 32 to 58 years (mean = 42 years). The vast majority (67%) of participating parents were college educated. CELF parents' occupations were quite diverse (i.e., teacher, office clerk, technician, lawyer, fireman, business owner, social worker, accountant). However, CELF families' household income median (\$115,000 U.S.) exceeded the contemporaneous income average of families residing in Los Angeles (cf. Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013a) and likely reflected CELF parents' relatively advanced educational attainment. CELF children's ages spanned from 1 to 18-years old. As was noted above, the family composition of each participating family included at least one "target" aged child who was between the ages of seven and twelve, so as to ensure that all CELF families were in a comparable stage of their "family life cycle" (McGoldrick and Carter, 2005) in which childrearing plays a key role. (For additional demographic details about the CELF study population, see Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013a).

# Ethics Statement

This research was conducted in accordance with the recommendations of the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The research protocol was reviewed and approved by the UCLA Institutional Review Board (UCLA IRB Protocol #G01–06–083–14). In accordance with the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, written informed consent was provided by, or on behalf of, all research participants. Written informed consent was obtained from all adults who participated in the research and from the parents of all non-adult research participants under the age of eighteen. Written informed assent was obtained from all non-adult research participants between the ages of seven and seventeen. Study participants' names have been

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disguised to safeguard confidentiality as per IRB-approved research protocol.

# Data Collection, Transcription, and Analysis Procedures

The CELF study's multi-modal compendium of research methods closely tracked and documented a proverbial "week" in the life of each working family who participated in the research project. Data collection methods included naturalistic observations of family members' household activities and routines, semistructured interviews and self-report measures provided by parents and children, and physiologic stress measures of family members' salivary cortisol levels. The research data employed in this article are drawn from the study's archive of observational and interview data.

Center on Everyday Lives of Families researchers conducted observational videotaping with each family over the course of a week, using digital video cameras outfitted with wide-angle lenses and remote microphones that allowed researchers to position themselves discreetly at a distance from research participants. Two researchers simultaneously videotaped family members as they carried out their daily activities, while a third researcher tracked and notated each person's activity involvement and use of space within the home at 10-min intervals. Observational data collection transpired on four separate days (2 weekdays, plus Saturday and Sunday), and commenced in the morning when family members awoke. On of these 3 days (2 weekdays, plus Sunday), the researchers also returned to document family members' afternoon and evening activities up until the time the children went to sleep. Approximately 50-h of videotaped observational data were collected for each participating CELF family. In addition, CELF researchers conducted video- and audio-taped interviews with family members on a range of topics including daily routines, social networks, education, health, and attitudes toward work and family.

Family members were introduced to the video cameras prior to the time that formal data collection procedures began. This helped them become accustomed to the presence of researchers with digital recording equipment in their home. CELF participants' initial reactivity and self-consciousness about being videotaped diminished as they acclimated to the CELF research procedures. In addition, the prolonged duration of the video data collection in each family decreased any inclination for participants to sustain an ongoing "performance" that was purposively geared toward displaying socially desirable behavior.

The study's ethnographic, observational research methods are designed to document the naturalistic ebb and flow of family life as it spontaneously occurs, moment by moment. CELF data collection procedures sequentially chronicle what participants do and say, how and where they position themselves in relationship to their material and ecological surroundings, and how they orient and respond to each other.

All video- and audio-taped data were digitized, logged, and transcribed by CELF research assistants using vPrism computer software that allows for synchronization of the video images and audio tracks with the accompanying written record of the discourse phenomena. Data were transcribed employing conversation analytic transcription conventions (adapted from Atkinson and Heritage, 1984). The author (KS) subsequently completed an additional, more fully detailed transcription of the discourse data analyzed and discussed in this article to facilitate the identification of relevant discourse phenomena and to enhance the granularity of the data analysis (see **Appendix**).

The fine-grained transcription and analysis of discourse data illuminates pertinent, sequentially unfolding features of talkin-interaction. These include people's spoken words, syntax, vocal timbre, pitch, and prosody, facial expressions, eye gaze, and embodied posture and positioning as they interface with pertinent features of the material and ecological surround (Goodwin, 2013, 2018).

Additional rounds of data coding also were carried out by KS using an inductive "grounded theory" data analysis approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Glaser and Strauss, 2017) to identify pertinent interactional features and patterns that empirically and organically emerged from the data. This approach accords with a discourse analytic perspective in that both methodological frames foreground research participants' orientations, actions, and understandings with respect to the interactions in which they are engaged. The families and discourse excerpts selected for discussion and analysis in this article constitute representative exemplars that illustrate broader patterns in the larger research data corpus.

The discourse analytic perspective I employ in this article considers talk-in-interaction as a vital compendium of sociocommunicative practices that are instrumental in formulating and shaping historically and socioculturally rooted dispositions, values, stances, and tastes—and that structure plausible fields of action in conjunction with political, economic, and social potentialities and constraints (cf. Goodwin, 2000, 2013; see also Sirota, 2010b, 2018). This approach documents and analyzes salient aspects of interactional process and content. The article also explores children's active roles, contributions, and participation in cultural learning through analytic vantage point of language socialization (cf. Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984, 2011), which attends to the co-constructed communicative processes involved in apprenticing children's cultural competencies, values, identities, dispositions, and worldviews—and in which children and mentors each actively contribute.

#### Analysis and Discussion

The data findings and interactive data sequences detailed in this section exemplify two distinctive socialization practices for morally accountable emotion management that are evident in the CELF data corpus and that CELF research participants, from their own perspective, emically term, "pep talks" and "time outs." It bears noting that both of these terms ("pep talk" and "time out") are also commonly used in the American sporting domain. (This athletic parlance is a possible source for this terminology's appropriation into the U.S. middle-class family sphere). It also is important to note that a number of highly effective childrearing practices in the United States and elsewhere are less explicitly cognized and lexicalized as compared with the pep talk and time out practices that are identified and discussed

here (cf. Quinn et al., 2018; Sirota, 2018). The data examples and families selected to illustrate these discursive phenomena in the section below are representative of broader findings evident in the CELF data corpus as a whole.

A total of 213 "pep talk" and "time out" sequences were identified across the entirety of the CELF video data corpus. Included in this total are a sub-corpus of 106 "pep talk" sequences and a sub-corpus of 107 "time out" sequences. "Pep talks" and "time outs" were fairly evenly distributed across the research sample of 32 participating families. "Pep talks" and "time outs" both were evident in 84.38 percent of CELF families (n = 27). Three CELF families (9.37%) employed "time outs" but did not make use of "pep talks" during the study observation period. By comparison, two CELF families (6.25%) used "pep talks" but did not employ "time outs." Notably, however, all 32 CELF families employed at least one (if not both) of these practices during the data collection period. The number of "pep talk" sequences per family ranged between zero and twelve (mean = 3.31) whereas the number of "time out" sequences per family ranged between zero and ten (mean = 3.34). 75 children (ages one to sixteen) participated in the CELF study. The mean number of "pep talks" per participating child was 1.41. In comparison, the mean number of "time outs" per participating child was 1.43. Albeit, the use of "pep talk" and "time out" sequences was more prevalent among CELF school-aged children and young adolescents (ages five to thirteen) in comparison with younger CELF toddlers and pre-school-aged children (ages one to four) and CELF adolescents (ages fourteen to sixteen). As will be further explored in the data analysis and discussion sections that follow, these latter findings suggest that CELF parents held differing developmental expectations regarding emotion management and the use of emotion management socialization practices with relatively younger versus older children.

## Data Examples: "Pep Talks" and "Time Outs"

"Pep talks" are intended to soothe children's ruffled emotions during a moment of distress while simultaneously boosting children's feelings of efficacy and self-confidence. For purposes of this study, "pep talks" are differentiated from more generalized parental compliments to children in that pep talks involve extended interactional sequences that span two turns at talk or more by parent and child, respectively. Moreover, pep talks commenced in response to a child's verbally articulated (and/or corporeally displayed) disappointed, dejected, or saddened mood. During pep talk sequences, parents validated—and commiserated with—children's upset feelings. In addition, parental reassurance aimed toward instilling a sense of hope so as to encourage children to move forward and take further action toward resolving the problem at hand. As one CELF father, Adam Lear (with two daughters, ages eight and six), explained during a research interview:

It's important for kids to learn how to not get too upset over small things. I tell my daughters: "It's a waste of your energy to be **crying** over something like this. Try to turn that energy into something you need to do for the next half an hour. Not crying." It's the same idea as with lemons and lemonade, you know? You just want to **change** the mood for them. I push them to do something that will help them feel **good** about themselves so they are moving in the direction of staying happy, and positive, and whatever. By **applying** their ability to make decisions and choices and change. Which then translates into feeling good, and healthy, and well **balanced**. All that kind of stuff. Not to go the other way and be stuck and angry and frustrated, you know?

Likewise, in another CELF family, when 7-year-old Michael Reis pouts about not being chosen to play the "goalie" position in his upcoming ice hockey match and consequently threatens to quit the game, his parents Jerry and Pam initiate a pep talk to calm and reassure him. "Do I **have** to go? I like being goalie **more**!" Michael implores in a frustrated voice tone. "I know you do," acknowledges Jerry. "But this will be an **opportunity**. Just try it for a day. It'll be fun," he optimistically suggests. "Why don't you want to go?" Pam inquires of her son. "I can goalie **better**!" Michael insistently counters. Pam then provides additional encouragement and proffers a suggestion to reframe the situation: "You're going to be an amazing skater today because you're not going to have all that extra weight (protective goalie gear) on you. You can skate out for one day. You can be the **assistant** goalie. And help out the goalie." Michael enthusiastically endorses this idea. His countenance brightens as he fetches his hockey stick and imaginatively enacts assisting a teammate block a goal. Michael's mood is thus buoyed as Pam and Jerry provide offer him words of encouragement and urge him to pursue options that will help him to successfully participate in the ice hockey game.

In a CELF household nearby, 8-year-old Jack Walters is similarly encouraged and spurred on by a parent-child "pep talk" after he expresses feelings of disappointment about the grades he earned on his report card. Jack ruefully hangs his head and heaves a heavy sigh, as he wistfully informs his parents, "I thought I was going to do better. I thought I was going to at least get some fours on my report card." Jack's mother, Lila, offers immediate words of comfort to her son. "You're **so** smart. It's not that you're not **capable**," she reassuringly suggests. "We'd like to see you apply yourself to your **potential** so you can get the grades you're capable of " Lila adds. Jack's stepfather, Matt, chimes in to provide added support. "We're so proud of you," he proclaims. Jack's palpable relief is evident in his physical demeanor as he sits upright and smiles broadly in response to his parents' moraleboosting comments.

In contrast to "pep talks," during which family members huddle around a distraught child, "time outs" entail an imposed period of solitary quiescence during which a child is temporarily separated from the ongoing stream of social activity in order to interrupt and calm an infelicitous outburst of untoward behavior and emotion. In such instances, parents use the emotional meaning and salience of their relationship with children as leverage toward attaining children's compliance with culturally identified norms of emotion expression and regulation. As CELF father-of-two, Kent Yokoyama, recounts during an informal interview with researchers:

Sometimes the kids get moody. They have their- sort of emotional ups and downs. And they'll get a little whiney, you know? And

**that** doesn't help when they have to interact. First, stop your whining. Go take some time out and calm down. And **then** we'll listen. And the world's not ending. So just keep breathing and you'll survive, you know? Like the other day when Kei (8-yearold daughter) was whining and fussing. I said to her, "Shush Kei, go inside! It's time to stop **whining**. Go inside and **settle down**."

An additional illustration of such "time out" principles arises in another CELF family when 9-year-old Hannah Friedman instigates an altercation while playing a computer game with her 8-year-old brother, Daniel. When Hannah repeatedly disregards her parents' requests to "please stop screaming" and then also begins to cry, her father, Tom, issues a "time out" command: "Hannah, stop the whining. I want you in your room. Right now." Hannah's mother, Alice, reinforces this message in short order by telling Hannah: "You don't need to scream. You need some quiet time. Go upstairs." Later, when Hannah is calmer, Tom and Alice remind both children about their expectations for acceptable decorum. "What do we use instead of kicking our hands or feet? What are we supposed to use?" Alice asks the children. "**Words!**" Daniel replies without hesitation. Furthermore, as Tom emphasizes: "Mommy keeps order. That means if people argue and don't listen, she puts them in time out." During a CELF research interview, Alice Friedman discusses the importance of maintaining a "sense of balance" with the children. "Because if I'm stressed out," Alice emphasizes, "they get- they're stressed." Further, she avers, "If I'm calmer, **they're** calmer. And they sense it."

Across town, 4-year-old Jason Goodson's father initiates a "time out' for Jason during a Sunday afternoon backyard baseball game. When Jason refuses to relinquish the bat and, in a flash of anger, menacingly swings it toward another child, Chad directs Jason to immediately "put it down, don't swing it like that!" However, Jason willfully ignores his father's admonitions and continues to wield the bat. Chad then asks Jason in no uncertain terms: "Do you want to play? Or do you want to go inside?" When Jason responds by angrily hurling the bat across the yard, Chad approaches him, takes him by the hand, and escorts him to his room. "Okay, that's it," he apprises Jason. "You don't throw things at people. You're not allowed outside for 2 min. You need to stay in your room until then." When Jason later emerges from his room, Chad inquires of him: "Are you ready? Do you feel better now?" Jason, in response, appearing calmer now, signals his affirmation. Hence, he is permitted to rejoin the game. "If you act the right way," Chad explains, "then things will happen the right way." As Chad Goodson later remarks during a CELF research interview, "I think it's very important to be consistent. To teach him how to calm down." Jason's mother, Allison, adds: "It's important to attain some type of equilibrium that makes everything balanced."

"Pep talk" and "time out" childrearing practices propel CELF children toward preferred strategies for managing their emotions and, concurrently, toward developing the capacity for selfsoothing as a culturally resonant moral technique. These U.S. middle-class childrearing aims exemplify a culturally idealized emotional style that social historian Stearns (1994) terms, "American cool." Expressions of emotion to trusted figures such as parents are encouraged; however, "emotion must not get out of hand" (Stearns, 1994, p. 191). "One could 'be oneself,"' Stearns emphasizes, "only so long as one's maturity assured that one's emotions would remain in check and not bother others" (Stearns, 1994, p. 192). These socio-historically shaped American middle-class childrearing practices and ideals, which came to prominence in the mid- to late-twentieth century, emphasize a "restraint of intense emotion" in the interest of "socializing well with others" (Stearns, 2003, p. 73). Significantly, however, as Stearns (1994, p. 4) additionally takes note, although not ubiquitously or uniformly adopted, "emotional culture forms an aspect of middle-class standards that ha(s) some hegemonic power." These cultural conventions of emotion—or "feeling rules" in sociologist Hochschild (1979, 2012) terms are resonant with neo-liberal "emotion pedagogies" (Wilce and Fenigsen, 2016, p. 86) that aspire to cultivate "selfmanaged and self-responsible" persons who learn to regulate their emotions for the benefit of self and others. Middle-class U.S. ethnotheories of emotion, such as those articulated by CELF parents, resonate with professionalized discourses of "positive psychology" (e.g., Seligman, 2011) that champion the merits of emotional temperance and self-regulation in the interest of social connection and "belonging."

It bears noting that the interpersonal contexts in which "pep talk" and "time out" practices take shape play a central role in conveying the cultural lessons being taught. Emotionally significant relationships hold sway as caregivers situationally and conditionally bestow, or withhold, attention and approval to children in conjunction with their efforts to bolster children's abilities to suitably manage their own emotions in culturally approved ways. "Pep talk" and "time out" sequences mark overt breaches of conventionalized emotional norms in which children's visibly (and auditorily) displayed emotional distress is perceived by CELF parents (such as the aforementioned Alice Friedman and Chad and Allison Goodson) to be "out of balance." These circumstances spark a call to action on parents' part.

During "pep talk" sequences, parents identify children's outof-sorts emotions as attributable to morally accountable reasons that are not of the children's own making (e.g., as due to others' oversights or transgressions). In such instances, parents huddle together with children and hold them emotionally and relationally close. In contrast, "time out" sequences are precipitated by children's untoward emotional (and behavioral) outbursts that are interpreted by parents as signaling a moral breach on the child's own part. Under these circumstances, parental approbation and attention are conditionally withheld until such time as a child calms down and brings their emotions into check. For example, as CELF mother, Pam Reis, articulates to her 7-year-old son, Mikey, as he oppositionally defies her instructions to finish his homework and raises his fist in her direction: "If you touch me in any way that is not a hug, you're going to be in bed. That is **not** how we express our emotions." However, in conjunction with both "pep talks' and "time outs," children are positioned as responsible moral agents who are charged with affirmatively managing their emotions vis-à-vis their subjectively experienced feeling states and their publicly displayed affective expressions. Moreover, children are accorded

moral agency to make socioculturally suitable choices. These core themes are further examined in the extended CELF data sequences that are detailed below.

For example, when 8-year-old Beth Barnes appears restless during her older sister Sonya's soccer match, her mother, Jacqueline, attempts to calm Beth's mood by recruiting her into the morally responsible interpersonal task of providing a "pep talk" to 10-year-old Sonya, who is in the midst of a challenging game. "Go tell Sonya she's doing a good job, sweetie." Jacqueline further instructs Beth: "Give her some moral support." In doing so, Jacqueline positions Beth as a morally accountable agent who is capable of productively managing her emotions in the interest of providing encouragement and solace to her older sister, Sonya. Beth is afforded an opportunity to apprentice into the culturally meaningful role of being emotionally attuned and accountable to others.

However, a short while later, Beth's ill-tempered emotions resurface. "Don't freak out, sweetie," Jacqueline advises. However, Jacqueline's directive to her daughter proves to be of no avail. Beth continues to act disruptively, in a mischievous fashion. When Beth makes several attempts to seize her father Neil's soft drink out of his hands, he somberly asks Beth: "Are you gonna continue to be **nasty**, or what?" Neil's query is met with silence from Beth. When Beth declines to affirmatively choose and endorse the morally preferred course of action, Neil directs Beth to "go stand over there, by that big light pole." He further advises: "We don't want you here if you're going to be acting like that. If you act like that, you can go away. When you feel like you can be civilized, you can come back." Beth reluctantly backs away in response to her father's admonishment as she goes to stand next to the appointed light pole. Later, a newly sobered and visibly calmer Beth returns and sidles alongside her father. With lesson learned, she seeks solace in his company once more. The "time out" proposition Neil renders to Beth provides a moral lesson that employs the socializing emotion of disapproval, which is operationalized through Neil's temporary withdrawal of parental attention to Beth. The moral precept at stake—about how to contain one's emotions in a "civilized" manner—is thus rendered for Beth in immediate and concrete first-person terms.

Parent-child relations are also at stake in the Morgenstern family. In the following interactional "time out" sequence, 4-yearold Lowell's mother, Jeri, utilizes the mother-child relationship to motivate a shift in attitude on his part. As the sequence begins, Jeri (line 01) endeavors to help Lowell put on his shoes. Lowell chants raucously as Jeri does so (e.g., lines 02–04, 11–13, 15). When Lowell's chants grow ever more infelicitous and boisterous (lines 12–13), Jeri leans toward him and catches his gaze (lines 16–17). She then sternly asks Lowell if he needs to "spend some time" in his room (line 18). When he demurs (line 19), Jeri makes it clear to him that she prefers to hear "nice happy words" rather than the type of words he has been using (lines 20–27):

Data sequence #1



When Lowell's boisterous chants about his "stinky **shoes**" (lines 02–04) become ever more discourteous (e.g., lines 13, 15: "Big fat LIAR! Big fat **LIAR!** You're a big fat **LIAR!**"), in Jeri's view, she leans in toward Lowell and repeatedly catches and holds his gaze in a direct facing formation (e.g., lines 16– 17, 21, 25). Jeri's embodied countenance and her stern tone of voice (e.g., lines 14, 16, 18) communicate to Lowell her

seriousness of purpose. When Jeri, in line 18, asks Lowell: "Do you need to spend some time in your room?" she positions him as a morally accountable actor who is expected to manage the emotions he expresses, along with the behaviors that flow from these emotions, in socially responsible ways. Jeri next reflects back to Lowell the discrepancy she perceives between his facial expression and the feeling tone of the words he is speaking (lines 20–22, 24–27). She also explicitly articulates her expectations by telling Lowell in no uncertain terms (lines 26–27) that, "I want to hear nice **happy** words. I don't want to (.) hear **those** words." Additionally, Jeri seeks affirmative uptake from Lowell (line 27: "Okay?"). In doing so, she again positions Lowell as a morally accountable agent who is called upon to assume responsibility for his response. The relational fulcrum—in which parental approval and attention are potentially at stake—provides an interactionally salient means of leverage that helps prompt the emotional tenor of the action trajectory toward a more lighthearted tone. Lowell's unhesitating convivial response in line 28 ("=The Big Fat Liar is a movie."), which he accompanies with laugher, improvisationally shifts the interaction's referential focus by reframing the meaning and purpose of the words that Jeri (lines 20–21) has previously delineated as "**not** nice happy words." The contested words "big fat liar" consequently are recontextualized and are thus provided with a culturally acceptable warrant and purpose by virtue of their association with a popular movie that Lowell and Jeri can amicably discuss with one another (lines 28–30).

Several days later, when Jeri's 8-year-old daughter Anna becomes emotionally distraught while experiencing difficulties with her homework, Jeri again employs a "time out" strategy. In doing so, Jeri prompts Anna to get a handle on her emotions. When Jeri's initial efforts to help calm her daughter prove to be of no avail (lines 01–31, below), she proposes a "time out" by baldly asking Anna: "Do you need to go to your room?" (line 32). When Anna continues to behave defiantly (e.g., lines 33, 39). Jeri informs her that, "this is not appropriate right now" (lines 35–38). She then lays out a series of definitive choices for Anna, which communicate her expectation that Anna respond as a morally accountable agent (lines 40–41): "Are you going to finish your homework? Or go to your room? Those are your choices. It's your decision." When Anna once more equivocates (line 42), Jeri again proposes a "time out" for Anna (line 43: "Do you want to take a few minutes?"). This sparks a reevaluation on Anna's part and facilitates Anna's capacity to regain her composure and subsequently resume her homework (lines 44–46):




In responding to Anna's palpable emotional distress, Jeri makes efforts to establish and display empathic attunement with Anna so as to help relieve her daughter's expressed disquietude (e.g., lines 02, 09–11, 21–24, 30, 37–38). However, Anna continues to appear inconsolable and emotionally distraught (e.g., lines 01, 08, 12, 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 28–29, 31). Jeri's suggestions of a "time out" for Anna are intermittently couched as questions, in indirect terms (lines 32, 35, 40). These are posed in conjunction with Jeri's baldy direct parental edicts (e.g., lines 34, 36, 41) and as such soften their authoritative tone. This discursive combination of parental authority and emotional support provides a structured yet empathically engaging interactional exchange in which Anna is encouraged to responsibly manage her emotions in socially permissible ways. As the sequence closes, Anna, now visibly calmer, re-attains an alignment of perspectives with her mother and also successfully carries on with her homework (lines 43–45).

In another CELF household across town, 8-year-old Tara Lear fusses when her mother, Cheryl, encourages her to share a new toy with her younger sister Cassie (age six). "Why does **she** have to see it?" Tara indignantly exclaims. Cheryl proposes an alternate solution: "Come sit on the floor and look at it together. It's more fun doing things together." "I don't **care!**" Tara exclaims. She hurls the toy to the floor and menacingly sticks out her tongue. When her sister Cassie retrieves the discarded toy, Tara bats it from Cassie's hands and reclaims it for herself. "Tara! One more time and you'll be in your room," her mother warns. Notably, as in many of the "time out" data sequences evident in the CELF data corpus, Cheryl poses a conditional set of options from which Tara is expected to choose. Tara and other CELF children (such as Lowell and Anna Morgenstern) are thus construed as morally responsible actors who are encouraged to handle their emotions, along with their ensuing actions, in culturally endorsed ways. Moreover, parents take pains to actively guide children toward culturally preferred moral choices in which "smooth relations with others" (Stearns, 1994, p. 190) play a paramount role.

During a CELF research interview, Tara and Cassie's parents talk about how they encourage the girls to take active charge of their emotional lives by "chang(ing) their mood" to "help create better balance." The girls' father, Adam, emphasizes that, "it's important to instill a positive attitude so the kids grow up feeling confident about themselves and good about themselves." Cheryl also notes that, "it's important to not keep things bottled up inside. It's important to talk it out. . . . If they keep it inside, I just think that would be damaging."

Cheryl translates this ideology into action several days later when she invites 10-year-old Cassie to "talk out" her feelings about an upsetting incident that transpired with a school classmate. When Cheryl discovers Cassie crying in her room, she prompts Cassie to articulate her feelings and identify the source of her distress (lines 01–04, below). When Cassie endorses potent feelings of anger as well as sadness (line 05), Cheryl engages Cassie in a problem solving pep talk, as follows in the data sequence below:


fpsyg-10-01456 June 25, 2019 Time: 18:6 # 10


During this heart-to-heart mother-daughter talk, Cheryl encourages Cassie to articulate her feelings, directly and unabashedly (e.g., lines 02, 04, 06, 23–25, 27–28). Cassie's mother guides her in translating her feelings into self-protective assertive action rather than using them to wound others (e.g., lines 13–17, 23–25). Moreover, she takes pains to deter Cassie from internalizing a sense of self-blame, lest Cassie regard herself as "a problem" (lines 27–28, 34–35, 44). Cheryl thus articulates her own sense of pride in her daughter, which is delivered in tandem with a morale boosting hug and a motherly expression of love (e.g., lines 39–41). Cheryl's corporeal engagement with Cassie throughout the exchange—via comforting embraces, soothing voice tones, and direct eye-to-eye contact—facilitate Cassie's ability to contain the strong feelings she is experiencing and to regain a sense of efficacy and pride (e.g., lines 33, 43, 45).

CELF parents Jacqueline and Neil Barnes espouse a parenting philosophy that likewise incorporates morale bolstering strategies on their daughters' behalf. Says Jacqueline: "I want them to have confidence in themselves." This childrearing approach comes to the fore, for example, during 8-year-old Beth's Saturday morning soccer game. When Beth expresses disappointment over her performance as the team's goalie, Jacqueline joins her on the field and engages Beth in a confidence strengthening "pep talk." In the data sequence that follows, Beth (line 01, below) appears dejected when Jacqueline arrives at her side. Jacqueline, in turn, offers Beth reassurance and consolation, which she expresses through her words as well as through her embodied demeanor (e.g., lines 02–03, 05–06, 13):

Data sequence #4



When Beth (line 01) appears downcast following her soccer game, Jacqueline provides solace. "Hey sweetie, you did such a good job! I'm so **proud** of you!" she enthusiastically exclaims (lines 02–03). Beth (line 04), however, counters her mother's assessment of the situation: "But they scored a **goal**," she protests. In response, Jacqueline proffers a face-saving rationale (line 05): "There was no **way** you could have gotten that," she emphatically tells Beth. "That was so **high**. There was no way," Jacqueline adds (line 06). She kisses Beth and scoops Beth into her arms. "It was just **too** high for you," Jacqueline remarks, as she carries Beth across the field (lines 08–09). "It's stressful being goalie, right?" Mom (line 10) later inquires of Beth. "Yeah," Beth concurs (line 11). "'Cause, if they score-" Beth's voice trails off, midsentence, and Jacqueline steps in to finish the thought (lines 11–12): "You feel like it's your fault." "But," she continues on (lines 13, 15–17), "it's really **everybody's** fault, right? That was a good game against the **hardest** team. . . . So **good** game!" The pep talk Jacqueline provides for Beth is designed to sooth her disappointed feelings and to bolster her sense of efficacy. During the interactional sequence, Beth listens intently (e.g., line 14) and she responds to her mother with a nod and a smile (line 18). However, as Beth reflexively reevaluates the situation and her feelings about it during a subsequent CELF research interview, she articulates a more complex, emotionally ambivalent point of view. For instance, as Beth remarks later during the research interview:

It's scary being a soccer goalie. And, last game I didn't stop one ball. My mommy says I'm great but I don't know if I'm good or not. . . . I believe my mom but I still think she may be saying that to make me feel better.

In other instances, CELF research data chronicled children's wholehearted uptake of their parents' "pep talk" endeavors, which were intended to boost children's motivation, determination, and self-esteem. For example, 10-year-old Leslie Walters provides a motivating pep talk on her own behalf that is geared toward revitalizing her lagging school performance. Leslie speaks aloud within the earshot of other family members, as follows:

I'm going to show him (Leslie's athletic coach), and I'm going to say: "I'M NOT BAD IN GRADES!" I'm going to just really improve 'cause I **really** want to get a good grade. And I'm going to be, "wow!" I'm going to try to do my best, take my time, and do my best!

Several days later, upon receiving news of Leslie's gradually improving academic performance, Leslie's mother, Lila, provides her with further encouragement by initiating a mother-daughter "pep talk." Lila lauds Leslie as she enthusiastically observes, "Honey, this is the **best** report card you've **ever** had!" Leslie responds by musing to her mother: "I think that's the hardest I ever worked!" "And, look at the **results**!" Lila zealously exclaims. Leslie smiles broadly as she contemplates her mother's heartening words. "But you see, honey," Lila underscores, "the hard work isn't for **nothing**, is it?" Leslie concurs by nodding her head emphatically. "I just need to try extra, extra hard!" she concludes. Leslie's self-motivating words are accompanied by a noticeably brightened mood and a tone of determination and self-assurance.

The moral lessons that inhere in the parent-child "pep talk" and "time out" practices explored in the preceding CELF data sequences hold sway to influence children's culturally shaped oeuvres of emotional resources and responses. As demonstrated above, such practices shape the evaluative frameworks through which children learn to read and respond to others' emotions. In line with these data findings, I propose that interpersonal relations, affect, and morality are critical intertwined dimensions of cultural acquisition as children navigate landscapes of emotion in tandem with those in their social surround. The intimate interpersonal relationship between parent and child serves as a resource to scaffold and encourage children's attentional focus on the culturally and morally preferred affective dispositions, orientations, and stances that are being mentored. The parent-relationship thus provides a motivational impetus that propels children to further action and mastery of the emotionally and morally resonant lessons at hand. Parental disapproval—and the temporary prohibition of children from the close physical proximity and positive emotional attention of parents (and others)—are used as negative reinforcements in conjunction with "time outs" in motivating children to refrain from unwanted behaviors and to learn salient lessons about culturally preferred affects, attitudes, and behaviors. Emotion within the context of the parent-child relationship is thus used to mark important moral lessons in affectively noticeable and memorable ways.

By closely considering culturally entwined aspects of morality and emotion, we are spurred to contemplate how emotions and their moral dimensions may operate as lodestones that draw people together or, alternatively, may serve as barricades that separate people from one another. Additional theoretical and practical implications that flow from these research findings, along with potential directions for additional future research, are explored in the concluding section below.

# CONCLUDING REMARKS

The research findings explored above sketch out the contours of two culturally shaped discursive framings of emotion regulation employed by CELF families to mentor children into culturally preferred value orientations in the contexts of their daily lives. In this section, I further consider how these discursive configurations of emotion and morality, which CELF family members term "pep talks" and "time outs," serve as occasions for cultural learning that involve the transmission and shaping of culturally desirable aspects of moral personhood and relationality. As the preceding data examples illustrate, emotions employed within the context of the parent-child relationship during "pep talk" and "time out" sequences communicate and model to children culturally pertinent moral norms regarding the expression and management of emotions. It is argued that the emotional salience of the parent-child relationship supplies a motivational impetus that potentiates these opportunities for apprenticing children into salient practices, techniques, and norms of emotional regulation and expression.

The current research suggests that parental communications to children that convey praise and approval, or that conversely relay disapproval, are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this U.S. middle-class cultural milieu. Children are thus urged to heed caregivers' emotionally salient, interpersonal appeals. As they do so, they are mentored into morally resonant techniques for managing their emotions, such as selfsoothing practices that make use of positive uplifting self-talk. Significantly, as well, when caregiving adults recognize, appraise, and respond to children's outward signs of emotional distress or perturbation, caregivers are themselves engaged in a mutually shaped moral project that engages "institutionally and culturally informed techniques" for rectifying children's "troubles" and for "guiding their behavior" (Kidwell, 2011, p. 262). As they do so, caregivers employ a broad variety of sensory modalities, including touch, talk, gaze, and other proprioceptive capacities to facilitate a "recalibration of the child's emotional state" (Cekaite and Kvist, 2017, p. 127). This involves cultural learning that transpires at the "level(s) of form, movement, feeling, and sentiment" (Schwartz, 1976, p. xi).

Notably, however, "time outs," in particular, were rarely employed with CELF toddlers (age two and younger). CELF parents instead were inclined to offer such youngsters affective and corporeal comfort and reassurance (such as holding, cuddling, and/or distracting) to calm their ruffled emotions. This data finding suggests that CELF parents held different developmental expectations for these younger children as compared with older children. Although the number of these younger children among the CELF data sample is relatively small (n = 5), these findings are suggestive of a promising direction for additional future research. When "time outs" were

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employed for socialization purposes with pre-schoolers and kindergarteners (ages three to five), CELF parents commonly employed a direct (e.g., gaze-to-gaze) facing formation to help secure and maintain their child's attention, in combination with concrete tactile and corporeal cues (e.g., such as physically guiding children), as did 4-year-old Jason Goodson's father in the data example detailed earlier. Although "pep talks" were used across all age groups, they were most commonly employed with CELF school-aged children and young adolescents (ages five to thirteen). "Time outs," likewise, were most often used with this same age group who presumably possess more fully developed linguistic capacities and cognitive reasoning skills in comparison with younger children. "Pep talks" and "time outs" were employed less frequently with CELF older adolescents (ages fourteen to sixteen). This finding implies that CELF parents may expect these youth to have more fully internalized the culturally and morally prescribed expectations and skills of emotion management.

The CELF "pep talk" and "time out" data examples suggest that motivationally salient discourses of emotion resonate with, and reinforce, consensually shaped "cultural models of virtue" (LeVine and Norman, 2001, p. 84). Such moral orientations, Shweder (2012, p. 91) argues, are "motivators of action in significant measure because they are affectladen and produce in people powerful feelings of arousal, distress, pollution, repugnance, guilt, indignation, pride, or shame." These are enacted across a range of CELF family activities and occasions, so as to mentor children into culturally valued stances, actions, competencies, and worldviews. The psychoculturally relevant themes that come to the fore in conjunction with "pep talk' and "time out" practices apprentice children into morally accountable ways of managing their emotions vis-à-vis their relations with others. These practices unfold amidst the culturally rooted "interpersonal space of related selves" that U.S. middle-class family life provides (Jenkins, 1991, p. 389). The socio-emotional climate that is fostered in conjunction with these emotionally pertinent moral "dramas" (Briggs, 1998) encompasses a suite of thematically and affectively linked value orientations, dispositions, and stances that are embodied and expressed across various domains of family life as children and parents take up—and reciprocally shape— culturally available resources, priorities, and scripts (cf. Goodwin et al., 2012).

The current analysis highlights culturally viable strategies employed by contemporary U.S. middle-class families for propelling children along cultural pathways for success. I argue that these "pep talk" and "time out" childrearing practices accord with what sociologist Lareau (2011) has termed, "concerted cultivation," whereby children's capacities and skills are purposively "cultivated" through active intervention and guidance. The "pep talk" and "time out" practices evident in the CELF data corpus fit with Lareau's conceptual characterization of "concerted cultivation" in that they are consciously and strategically used by CELF parents to develop and shape children's oeurvre of culturally and morally approved affective resources and skills. "Pep talk" and "time out" practices also have resonance with what anthropologist Kusserow (2004, 2005)—in her study of U.S. childrearing and social class describes as "soft individualism." Kusserow found that this childrearing strategy was prevalent among the New York middle-class families she studied. "Soft individualism," according to Kusserow (2005, p. 40) focuses on cultivating children's "unique feeling, thoughts, ideas, and preferences." Likewise, the "pep talk" and "time out" childrearing techniques used by CELF parents are geared toward developing children's discursively constructed selves, subjectivities, self-awareness, and points of view.

In closely tracking CELF research participants' discursive framings of normativity and moral accountability, it is important to attend to how each discursive frame incorporates—and shapes—deeply held sentiments and institutionally sanctioned values (cf. D'Andrade, 2008) vis-à-vis preferred cultural pathways for facilitating children's ongoing success and wellbeing. I argue that both discursive strategies ("pep talks" and "time outs") embody culturally warranted aims for motivating U.S. middleclass children along a pathway toward success in a post-industrial societal context that champions moral accountability toward others in addition to oneself. Such on-the-ground practices are compatible with broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others (cf. Rose, 1998; Wilce and Fenigsen, 2016). In a related vein, sociologist Friedman (2013, p. 3) observes that U.S. middle-class families have developed a robust set of resources and strategies intended to facilitate children's abilities to cultivate and maintain amicable, stable interpersonal relationships amid a broader social landscape in which U.S. middle-class children's socioeconomic futures are far from secure. Friedman (2013, p. 3) speculates that this trend stems from "middle class insecurity and concerns about children falling behind".

Importantly, however, formal and informal parental ethnotheories (Fung, 1999) of childrearing—and the cultural contexts in which they are employed, reinforced, adapted, and transformed—are most often "complex and multifaceted," rather than unambiguously uniform; as such, they facilitate developing children's capacities to flexibly, creatively, and adaptively "function in a dynamic and fluid society (Edwards et al., 2006, p. 149). In this respect, "pep talk" and "time out" practices are most accurately conceptualized as two points on an interrelated continuum rather than as mutually exclusive, discrete cultural alignments.

Cultural schemas of normativity—and their culturally resonant emotional, moral, and interpersonal orientations, qualities, dispositions, and worldviews—are aimed toward enhancing children's wellbeing and optimal development in relationship with the cultural worlds in which children reside. Cultural schemas, which involve experientially mediated "clusters of strong associations," are prototypically catalyzed in conjunction with heightened emotions such as those that are sparked through emotionally galvanizing childrearing practices (Quinn and Mathews, 2016, p. 359). It is proposed that this process takes place during CELF "pep talk" and "time out" data sequences in which morally charged affective stances

play a role in shaping culturally preferred patterns of feeling, meaning, and behaving. Through their recurrent participation in "pep talk" and "time out" practices, CELF children learn to attend to particular embodied feeling states and to associate these feelings with culturally shaped configurations in which co-occurring sentiments, actions, and interpersonal inclinations are regularly paired with one another. Such practices apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally and socially preferred ways. The children are thus mentored into culturally consonant moral techniques that involve identifying and responding to the emotions of self and others, such as practices that incorporate and encourage children's emotional self-soothing and motivational self-talk.

Affectively laden "pep talk" and "time out" childrearing practices incorporate key factors that psychological anthropologist Quinn (2005) specifies as facilitating children's successful developmental transformation into culturally valued adults. Quinn (2005, p. 477) posits that emotionally memorable, re-occurring, and thematically coherent cultural lessons such as these—which involve "emotional arousal" and caregivers' "evaluations of the child as approved or disapproved of " enhance children's overall receptivity to the lessons-at-hand by contributing to the lessons' unmistakability, durability, and motivational salience.

These culturally shaped moral priorities are explicitly and tacitly communicated, embodied, reinforced, and adapted as children and their parents co-participate in recurrent family activities and routines. Importantly, however, as is evident in the CELF data sequences, children and parents actively and improvisationally operate upon these cultural messages by imbuing them with shades of personal significance and meaning (also see Goodwin et al., 2012). Such "day-to-day workings of family life" (Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013b, p. 237) provide crucial clues as to how moral sentiments, stances, outlooks, and preferences come into fruition and are transacted in everyday lived contexts of use. Moreover, as is demonstrated by the current study's findings, this on-the-ground view of morality as it is lived and negotiated within naturalistic, interpersonal contexts serves to augment traditional understandings of morality and ethics as derived from more circumscribed methodological approaches.

Rogoff et al. (2018, p. 5) emphasize that the ecological validity of research findings about child development necessitates the direct study of children's naturalistic participation in day-to-day practices and settings, and amidst the cultural communities in which their everyday lives are lived. The current study's naturalistic ethnographic data findings are interesting to consider in tandem with the psychological research findings of Wang and Fivush (2005); also see Wang (2006) that employ elicited narrative data to explore parents' strategies for mentoring children into culturally salient emotion regulation techniques during parent-child conversations about emotionally noteworthy positive and stressful events. Wang and Fivush found that Euro-American mothers employed a "cognitive approach" that emphasized the use of explanatory rationales to assist children's sense-making and emotion regulation capacities whereas Chinese mothers employed a "behavioral approach" that emphasized proper conduct and that assisted children to regulate emotions by building their affiliations with others and by recognizing and adjusting to social norms. CELF parents' incorporation of "pep talks" and "time outs" into their children's day-to-day lives as culturally informed techniques for mentoring children into morally preferred practices of emotion regulation employ a combination of discursive and non-discursive genres that combine narrative self-reflection with socially embedded moral action, rather than employing mutually exclusive approaches.

However, the CELF study's modest number of research participants constitutes an important caveat that predisposes against any further, widespread generalization of the key research findings presented here. The current data findings are considered to be preliminary. For example, additional crosscultural comparison is a productive avenue for further, ongoing research. Discernable differences in gendered participation in "pep talk" and "time out" practices were not evident in the data, either among CELF children or among CELF parents. However, this is another fruitful area for continued future research in light of the CELF study's limited sample size. Research participants' potential video reactivity is another of the study's potential limitations. Albeit pertinent research data are generated even when participants are modeling "ideal typical" behaviors and affects, in that these are representative of what research participants take to be indicative of normative behaviors, affect, and utterances in accordance with local cultural schemas of such. The current study's findings are to be interpreted in light of a heterogeneous conception of culture, which construes it as a set of lived processes that conjoin individual lives with those of others in mutually recognizable ways but that also affords possibilities for individual, social, and historical variation and change.

# ETHICS STATEMENT

This research was conducted in accordance with the recommendations of the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The research protocol was reviewed and approved by the UCLA Institutional Review Board (UCLA IRB Protocol #G01–06–083–14). Written informed consent (or assent) was provided by research participants in accordance with the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki. Study participants' names have been altered to safeguard confidentiality as per IRB-approved research protocol.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

KS completed the fully detailed transcription of the discourse data that are analyzed and discussed in this article so as to facilitate the identification of relevant discourse phenomena and to enhance the granularity of the analysis. Additional rounds

of data analysis and coding were conducted by KS using a "grounded theory" approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Glaser and Strauss, 2017) to identify pertinent interactional patterns and features that organically and empirically emerged from the data. All data analysis procedures were conducted by KS. KS solely conceptualized this research topic and focus of analysis.

#### FUNDING

This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program on Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center Grants, 2001–2004 and 2004–2007, UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families: A Sloan Center on Working Families. Project Director: Elinor

#### REFERENCES


Ochs, Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center on Everyday Lives of Families.).

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author want to thank the interdisciplinary research team members of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, directed by Elinor Ochs, and generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program on Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families, headed by Dr. Kathleen Christensen. The author is particularly grateful to the families who participated in this study for hospitably welcoming CELF researchers into their homes and for graciously sharing the details of their lives.


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E. Ochs and T. Kremer-Sadlik (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press), 253–266.


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Strauss, C., and Quinn, N. (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sterponi, L. (2009). Accountability in family discourse: socialization into norms and standards and negotiation of responsibility in Italian dinner conversations.

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**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Sirota. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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14614456030050010401

Press), 3–26.

# APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

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The following transcription conventions, adapted from Atkinson and Heritage (1984), are employed in this article to demarcate conversational phenomena. A more fully detailed transcription of the discourse data (based upon Atkinson and Heritage, 1984) was also completed by KS to facilitate accurate identification of relevant discourse phenomena and to enhance the granularity of the data analysis.


(( )) Double parentheses indicate descriptions and/or commentary on the data.

# Self as an Aesthetic Effect

*Antonia Larrain1 \* and Andrés Haye 2*

*1 Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile, 2 Escuela de Psicología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile*

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative, and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity, but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic *effect* emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as *mine* by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation, and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency.

#### *Edited by:*

*Carolin Demuth, Aalborg University, Denmark*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*James Cresswell, Ambrose University, Canada Lakshmi Bandlamudi, LaGuardia Community College, United States*

#### *\*Correspondence: Antonia Larrain*

*alarrain@uahurtado.cl*

#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 01 February 2019 Accepted: 04 June 2019 Published: 28 June 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Larrain A and Haye A (2019) Self as an Aesthetic Effect. Front. Psychol. 10:1433. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01433*

Keywords: self, dialogical, aesthetics, theory of discourse, affection

# INTRODUCTION

τοῦ λόγου δ' ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν.

(Though the logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.) Heraclitus

Self is an elusive term (see Strawson, 1997), characterized by reflexivity, agency, and endurance, features extremely difficult to account for (see White, 1999). Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self without much discussion. Since psychology's inception, this unproblematic notion of self has been criticized for conceiving of self as something, an entity, a finished and self-contained thing: "It has been the tendency of psychology to deal with the self as a

**57**

more or less isolated and independent element, a sort of entity that could conceivably exist by itself " (Mead, 1934, p. 164). Self as a process, a social process, is then contrasted by Mead with self as an entity. Self-related notions such as self-esteem, self-concept, self-regulation, self-theories, among others, are building blocks of the way mainstream psychology accounts for processes such as motivation, identity, learning, and emotional well-being, among others. Contemporary notions of self in psychology seem to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about self that were elaborated with the formation of psychology, by seminal authors as different as William James and Lev Vygotsky. Focusing on the problem of self in particular, we argue that psychological thinking has tended to take the product of the process of becoming as the starting point, attributing substantial reality to it, thus overlooking its dependence over the endless effort of production on which it relies.

In the past, discussion of self has been resumed in cultural psychology from a critical and processual view. Dialogical selftheory (Hermans, 2001), based on the works of William James and Mikhail Bakhtin, has made a critical contribution to theorizing self as a dialogical process of taking different positions. Continuing the thread opened by Ken Gergen in the 1990s (Gergen, 1991) with the idea of a saturated self in contemporary society, Hermans (2001) conceives of self as a multiple and dialogical process of position-taking, but, unlike Gergen's (1991) view, it is related not to the modern conditions of life but to the inevitable social nature of self. From a sociocultural standpoint, some authors (e.g., Nelson, 2003) have developed a narrative notion of self, namely, self-unfolding through life narratives and autobiographical memory, which brings historical articulation to an otherwise disconnected and fragmentary experience of ourselves. From this perspective, self is constructed. However, in these theories, it is not clear if constructed selves are representations or ontological productions; sometimes they are treated as epiphenomena and sometimes selves are conceived as unities differentiated in part–whole relations or as psychological systems that are the causal grounds of agency. More radical philosophers relevant to cultural psychology, as diverse as Ricoeur (1992) and Butler (2006), have suggested how self involves ongoing narrative and endless performative efforts of constitution as singularities in or through discursive activity.

Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative, and performative nature of self, as opposed to an assumed idea of self as entity, it is not clear how cultural psychology would account for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image, or the persistence of substantial conceptions of the self. We think that any persuasive cultural notion of self should account not only for diversity, as its starting point, or its socialdiscursive constructive nature, but also for why it involves a somewhat unified experience of ourselves. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into serious account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We do so drawing on the work of classical authors who have had a relevant influence in cultural psychology, and who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming. We refer to James (1890/1952), Vološinov (1929/1986), Dewey (1934), Mead (1934), Vygotsky (1934/1987), and Bakhtin (1952–53/1986a). These authors, from a different era, all faced in their terms (in opposition to formalism, structuralism, associationism, positivism, and Kantianism) the need to develop a theoretical alternative to the philosophies of the substance and the subject, the two predominant models of being, in order to understand experience. Our method was to elaborate a documented interpretation of each author and trace conceptual connections among their theories, in order to mount our argument. The selective exposition of their works, which challenges the ways they have been read within psychology, should be read not as a literature review but as conceptual analysis.

# SELF AS A DIALOGICAL EFFORT AFTER ARTICULATION

James and Mead elaborated on their account of the self in dialogue with the notion of personal identity developed in classical empiricism, where *I* is not a given reality of mind but a construction based on perceptual experience, mediated by reflection, habits, and imagination. The theory of self in classical empiricism is already a theory about how "minds" produce identities, so identity is not given. Hume (1748/1952) emphasized that the sense of sameness is not contained in given experience but attributed and fictionalized by the subject through imagination and memory, collecting past experiences and giving them a unity based on the present experience. The radical empiricism of James (1904/1912) implies, on the contrary, that the *feelings* of similarity and difference are part of experience, not added to experience by subjects, and that, as developed by Mead (1934), these ever-new feelings during becoming are never unified to coincide with the present (of "mind"), but generate ever-new gaps or challenges to the building of a potential unity of past and future streams of subjectivity. Thus, with James and Mead, it is not that the subject produces his/ her own unity but that familiarities and differences among time-extended and socially distributed thoughts are articulated in the self-individuating production of subjectivity, ultimately yielding the feeling that experience is *mine,* but never the experience that *I* am a simple and complete unity.

James' (1890/1952) starting point was movement. Thinking, or any form of subjective experience or consciousness, simply goes on, as a constantly changing stream: "*no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before"* (James, 1890/1952, p. 149, emphasis in the original). However, the flow is continuous, being part of a *common whole* of subjective life extended in time, that is, a kind of unity at the scale of ontogenesis. Whatever the flow involves, it is *my* flow, which implies that *I* can appropriate, remember, conceive, and feel my past states of thought as mine: the flow is then elaborated in a way that generates in experience a sense of personal self. How is this possible given the continuous change? The stream of thinking is partly organized by an impulse of self-seeking, an impulse for providing the future and not just maintaining the present, which involves dealing with both rival drives persistent from the past and contradictory potential selves or self-projects. The extent to which this self-seeking effort leads to a gap between the actual and the potential (projected or desired) sense of self is related to how this will be felt (self-feeling). The condition of this tendency or impulse of self-seeking is the subjective multiplicity implied by the material stream of experience. In *Principles*, after discussing the production of movement (Chap. XXIII), James argues (in Chap. XXIV, on the concept of "instinct") that the specificity of human experience is the multiplicity and complexity of impulsive forces compared to other living beings (p. 393), opening the problem of their (im)possible unification.

Furthermore, James defines personal identity, or the "personal form" of experience, as "the sense of sameness perceived *by* thought and predicated of things *thought-about*" (James, 1890/1952, p. 214, emphasis in the original). The self, as a process and a relation, implies a constitutive difference between *me*, the perspective of everything I can call mine, such as my body, past experiences, and singularities, and *I*, the perspective of the subjective position from which certain tracts of experience are felt as mine or not, evaluated and thought about. This means that self implies both objectification and subjectification, because it involves the synthesis of the agent (*I*) and object of thought (*me*), which is not a dialectical synthesis, because each act of appropriation of oneself generates a new *I* position that is not contained in the experience of *me* that is integrated gradually at each moment. Thus, self is not a state, thing, or entity (see Zhao, 2014), but a reflexive operation of (self) differentiation, a struggle toward unity by means of the ever-new introduction of a constitutive difference. The subject, according to this theory, cannot be totally self-appropriated because each subjective act of appropriation is only provisional and engenders a tendency toward new potential paths in the self-production of subjectivity that are not contained in past experience. In this sense, we may be allowed to call this, following Bakhtin's discussion about this distinction in his late work (Bakhtin, 1974/1986b), not a dialectical but a dialogical theory that conceives the self in opposition to the modern notion of the subject as a unitary and self-determined center of agency.

We draw some specific implications of James' interpretation from the idea of self as *tendency*. Despite the fact that we have the experience of unity and closure, self is not the successful production of this unity, but a constant partially unsuccessful operation of returning over our past states of mind, which in itself produces novelty and difference. Self, as a microgenetic operation and ontogenetic activity, is always incomplete and only effective as a productive tendency. It is a problem, a challenge, addressed with diverse strength at different moments and in different individuating drifts. More than a reality or a fact, the unity of self is a promise to others and oneself that can only be pursued through self-differentiation (a promise we can neither keep nor abandon). Self refers to a psychological work within individuation, a process-product, and not to an individual reality or end-product of individuation. As such, self involves a temporal feeling of unity implied in the directionality of its promise, where the felt unity is taken as neither a fact nor a cause but as an emergent tendency, an *effect*. From here, we take one sense of the notion that self is an effect, according to which the problem of self calls for a theory about the performative work that has consequences in becoming, as James understood his "pragmatism" (James, 1907/1955).

Following James, Mead (1934) elaborated the idea of self as a socially mediated process of articulation of *I* and *me*, giving a clearer role to language and discursive communication. The key idea is that self arises through social and linguistic interaction because it is through this, through the perspective of others, that it is possible to become an object to oneself. For Mead, this means not to become a thing but to develop an *experience* of oneself, to *take a perspective* or *attitude* toward oneself. Self is not a mental construction but a "structural" process, a social process, in which the other's perspective toward my action (also a perspective) is appropriated or internalized, so that it can be taken by me toward my own actions. These perspectives that we take to ourselves are not intellectual, which is why he refers to them as attitudes: they are emotional and axiological positionings regarding other ones. Language is crucial because it is a conventional medium in which perspectives are not only taken but also shared and recognized by different people who are affected in similar ways by their expressions, just as these expressions, qua utterances, expect somebody else to be affected.

Mead also recognizes the diversity of subjectivity in terms of how different perspectives emerge in different moments of social life: "We are one thing to one man and another thing to another. (…) We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances" (Mead, 1934, p. 142). However, self means not just a relational process in which two parties are involved (*I* and *Me*). The reorganization and articulation (or integration, according to Gillespie, 2005) of this diversity are reached not through subjective synthesis, but by reference to the community to which he/she belongs because we do not just internalize specific perspectives of ourselves communicated to us by others; by appropriating them, we also appropriate social norms that organize our communal and institutional life, thus appropriating a "generalized other." It is through the ontogenetic internalization of a generalized other that social groups influence and exercise control over the behavior of individuals by entering it as a determining factor of their own thinking.

According to Mead (1934), the feeling of unity is an abstraction because, on the one hand, what unifies the experience is the social organization of self that involves different perspectives and attitudes in particular relationships. On the other hand, self depends on the performance of other selves, other's selfunification works and projects. Individuality consists precisely in the singular *importation* into subjective life of the broader ideological and axiological organization of the community, realized as intersubjective or group tendencies in concrete social interactions. Moreover, the singular appropriation or articulation of social normativity, as an individual self-unification work and project, must be recognized by the community as a member of a collective individuation context. Selves are social processes that are realized singularly in each case through others' perspective. Self is not a self-contained unity; according to Mead, it needs to be constantly completed by the recognition of others, and it is always awaiting that recognition.

The paradox of self is that experience, within self-individuation processes, is always demanded to realize a unitary organization of feeling and thought around the agency of the *I* but condemned to search and strive for it through others. A unitary organization based on the sameness of the subject is theoretically impossible. Even on a microgenetic scale, unification never takes place completely, insofar as there are many selves or self-projects struggling for unification interdependently and with frequently conflicting goals derived from the conflicting social interests within society.

# SELF AS A DIALOGICAL OPERATION IN DISCOURSE

On the basis of our interpretations of James and Mead, we follow Bakhtin's notion of language and discourse to define four features of self as an operation:

*Dialogic*. Self is a reflexive operation that has a social structure. Which structure is that? The structure of alterity: the response. Through the use and internalization of language practices, we acquire the capacity to objectify ourselves, to take perspectives, to respond, to ourselves. Because of this dialogical structure, we become able to have an experience of oneself. We conceive experience in the sense that Mead does: to have an experience is to take a perspective of, to respond to.

*Normative.* Insofar as the object-subject dynamic is referred to the generalized other (i.e., the normative aspect of self), self is a dialogical operation with a tripartite social structure: perspectives addressed to one another (I/We and You/They) and a generalized voice (Society). This theoretical scheme in Mead resonates with another aspect of Bakhtin, the figure of the *third* or *super-addressee* (Bakhtin, 1959–61/1986c).

*Performative*. Self is not only an activity rather than an entity, with some preferring to talk of *selving* instead of self (Thibault, 2019), but a dialogical operation that must be constantly performed in direct dependence of other selves. Self operates not only to articulate difference, but to do it in a particular way that can be recognized by others, according to the community norms. However, an identity resolution pursued through others' recognition, which mediates experience beforehand, never arrives because this social mediation renders self-individuation open to ever-new forms. Therefore, it is a dialogical operation in its own right: it is opened and inconclusive.

*Discursive*. Self unfolds through, and as, discourse. For this reason, as we read Mead (1934), it is dialogical, normative, and performative. From our reading of Bakhtin (1952–53/1986a) and Vološinov (1929/1986), discourse is a process of ideological engagement unfolding through different and juxtaposed languages. Discourse is the tensioned and dynamic field in which different perspectives, angles, voices, interests, and worldviews emerge through the materiality of words and languages in relations of contestation, opposition, agreement, and neglect, among others, many of which are in the same stream of discourse. As such, discourse is the process of human communication that involves different semiotic means (verbal and non-verbal) through which meaning is dialogically and dynamically produced and transformed, in social and individual realms. Thus, discourse is not something that happens *outside* or *between* individuals but a process that goes through them, questioning the boundaries between the social and the individual, the inner and the outer, the mine and the others, and constituting them from the inside (Vološinov, 1926/1976). Discourse and language do not represent realities, as duplicating worlds, but assume the material conditions of life as integral and constitutive parts of the process, through which a univocal view of the world is transformed into a perspectival, relative, engaging, historical view, inscribed in social and axiological hierarchies. Therefore, saying that self is discursive is to say that self is a dialogical operation that unfolds as the articulation of ever-changing and partially shared worldviews materialized in different social language uses, which has constant affective consequences. Self unfolds in the boundaries between mine and yours, outside and inside, the assumed and the explicit, among others.

However, self is not only a discursive dialogical operation; it involves the experience of unity. We do not appear to ourselves as ever-changing and disaggregated parts. We are not aware of the failure of resolving ourselves. How can we explain this? It is reasonable to accept that self-organizing systems can generate and recognize changes in their environment that in the long term inform their agency, so that the emergence of self-consciousness from computing mechanisms is expected [as demonstrated again by Friston (2018)], if not necessary [as suggested by Bergson (1896/1912)]. However, the question is how, in what forms, and with which subjective and objective consequences, real human beings deal with the problem of the multiplicity of experience beyond adaptation to the present. In our argument, human beings are considered not specifically as self-organizing systems but as socially mediated processes of self-individuation. The work of self takes place as long as we are participants of different cultures involving routines and repetitive social practices, shared beliefs and values, rules and norms, and institutions (see Zittoun, 2008). The repetitive encounter with others, playing specific and delimited roles in activities framed by shared norms and values, and the ongoing process of remembering, contribute to the feeling of sameness or enduring through experience. Regarding rituals and practices, the stability of these social practices contributes to one's recognition of the one that was yesterday, and its rituality provides relevant resources for identity formation.

This repetitive aspect of social practices is embodied in typical forms of utterance that Bakhtin (1952–53/1986a) conceived of as speech genres, only within which or in relation to which every utterance is unique and unrepeatable. In this sense, discourse involves difference and uniqueness but also repetition and stability. The typical forms of using language provide relevant information about presuppositions, offering resources to recognize speakers and addresses in their intentions and types. In this sense, cultural life involves norms as genres of behavior that frame social activity and condition the possibility of social recognition (see Butler, 2006). This normativity of social behavior is also a product or effect of discursive life. Norms and models are based on evaluative and axiological structures constructed historically and enacted through the use of language, operating as implicit or explicit voices in discourse. As norms endure and are typically widely shared in a given culture, and as subjects emerge, necessarily establishing dialogical relations of subjection, contestation, or both, they also offer important resources to the idea of subjective stability and endurance.

Nevertheless, practices and norms are not univocal, so they cannot unify experience. Moreover, through their tendency to establish a shared cultural world, they also conflict and tension subjectivity, imposing a power structure within the flow of co-affection, and diversifying and breaking it at the same time as they try to hold it through time. This is particularly the case because we live not in one homogeneous culture, but rather in intersections and ever-changing boundaries between different cultures and norms. In Bakhtin's (1934–35/1981) words, languages sediment different value and normative systems, but no speaker speaks only one language. Each word is the intersection between different languages that have used the same word for different purposes and in different axiological systems. So, when speakers use a word, they stand in a dialogical and intersectional territory in which different and contradictory norms demand their own responses. Therefore, routines and normativity, as much as they stabilize and homogenize, diversify and tension the flow of subjectivity. So, again, how is it possible to account for our provisional feeling of unity, based on which a whole psychological theory of subjectivity as an individual substance has been constructed?

Another relevant dimension is memory and history. As Katherine Nelson (1993, 2003) argued, following Ricoeur and Mead's ideas, self develops intimately associated with autobiographical memories and narratives (see also Wang and Brockmeier, 2002; Fivush et al., 2011). The personal sense of self is less about sameness than about inscribing oneself in shared narratives through which we get a historical structure and, in turn, a sense of continuity and singularity in relation to immediate and broader alterity. The implication of this way of thinking about self is that language, through its narrative potential, allows articulation of oneself historically in relation to a broader social context, so that the feeling of unity is a product of historical memory that articulates and knits not only different episodes of one's own life but also our life to social broader episodes, giving them density and inscribing them with a meaningful process of becoming.

However, stories about our life are not logical narratives but fiction, which involves an artistic and aesthetic dimension that may contribute to the kind of experience that the operation of self involves. The role that the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of narratives may play in the achievement of this sense or feeling of self has mostly been overlooked in cultural theories of self. Much attention has been paid to the role that memory and history play in the development of self, both of which are extremely important but which overlook the role that less rational dimensions, such as imagination and emotion, may play in it.

# THE ARTISTIC WORK OF SELF

# Taking a Unified Perspective of Oneself Through Art

John Dewey, in one of his late works, *Art and Experience* (Dewey, 1934), argues for the artistic and aesthetic dimension of everyday life. He reflects on the aesthetic underpinnings of the process of objectivation of the flow of experience, suggesting a strong link between self as a work of unification of experience, and art as a work of imagination toward transforming emotional and bodily experience. He critically discussed the idea of art as a specific and isolated realm of culture, and aesthetic experience as different from common, everyday experience. In short, art, as an everyday life activity, facilitates the objectification of experience, the transformation of a flow of experience into something we can have an aesthetic experience of, through its emotional unification.

According to Dewey (1934), experience is transit, movement, experience-in-becoming, in which emotions play a key role. Emotions are not an individual matter; they are socially shared and intimately intertwined with meanings and shared values and beliefs. As part of experience, emotions go on. We are typically engaged in experience as an affecting flow that goes on. Experience also involves a reflective dimension. We can intellectualize aspects of that experience, being able to think about it deliberatively; for instance, in the case of scientific thinking through which we imaginatively hypothesize and elaborate plans of intellectual action to reach conclusions. However, there are aspects of the flow that cannot be intellectualized, remaining desegregated pieces (blind spots) of the flow of experience but maintaining affective productivity; for instance, aspects hidden in the depths of our personalities as a building block thereof, or which are part of our memories or anticipations in a fuzzy way. Art, as an expressive activity in which objective and shared values are enhanced, calls for specific emotions, promoting the articulation of the otherwise disarticulated aspects or parts of experience that are felt in the same way. Art, therefore, through its expressive character, helps the integration and articulation of experience, giving it aesthetic density.

Art is not only a differentiated sphere of culture but it operates in the microgenesis of everyday life; but experience as a flow is not necessarily aesthetic, becoming aesthetic through artistic expression. Emotions, however, are more than simply gathered by artistic activity; they are transformed and imaginatively created as an object of experience, becoming attached to the object produced by the artistic expression. Artistic expression has a productive power over experience, transforming the flow into a totality, an object toward which we can take a perspective, a response. It is important to note that we are using experience in two senses: experience as the flow of experience in which we live and having an experience, or taking a perspective (following Mead, 1934). The aesthetic dimension of experience is the artistic affective integration of lived and imagined aspects of the experience. However, this integration does not represent the dissolution of tension or differences (as inferred from Giordano, 2017). It could be precisely the unification of contradictory emotions in one and the same stream of life.

Vygotsky (1925/1971) recognizes as the main potentiality of art the technical juxtaposition between different and contradictory emotions to produce an affective reorganization of experience. From Vygotsky's work (for example, *On Psychological Systems*, Vygotsky, 1930/1997) one may read that human emotions are culturally created and transformed through the use of language. In other words, the invention of language transformed not only thinking, memory, attention, among others, but also emotions and imagination. Moreover, he developed the idea that the whole personality is historically transformed and mediated by a specific system of concepts that every individual socially develops through social life. People living in different cultures do not feel the same way: we culturally and discursively create singular emotions and affective responses. In this sense, not only is affective life part of the creative effort of becoming, but this creative process is done through social techniques such as language use. This has different implications. First, emotions and affections are not given but have a historical and arbitrary nature. Second, they are not something that happens to us (passions) but something that we create, recreate, and alter technically, through the use of language. Third, emotions are not individual matters but collaborative: we feel and are emotionally affected like others and because someone taught us to do so.

Vygotsky conceives of art as a social technique for altering emotions. Although in social life, emotions are always a social and technical creation; in artistic expression, this is enhanced. It is as if art were the *technique of techniques*, that is, the manipulation of the otherwise conventionally used material form (signs) to create a completely unique emotional experience. This experience is characterized on the one hand, by the possibility of juxtaposing two contradictory emotions (catharsis), but also by the embodiment and objectification of shared and assumed emotions, meanings and aspects of social life, which, experienced as such, produce new emotions (see *On the problem of the psychology of the actor's creative work* (Vygotsky, 1936/1999).

Dewey and Vygotski pointed out five relevant aspects of art and aesthetics: (1) art is not an isolated cultural realm but part of everyday life; (2) it has an essential affective and emotional productivity; (3) it involves the totalization, unification, and objectification of experience in the sense that we can have an experience (take a perspective) of an otherwise elusive flow; (4) it is a technique through which we can enhance and create emotions by artificially juxtaposing even contradictory ones; and (5) art is part of language activity and verbal creation; or, in other words, it unfolds through discourse and develops only within its historic, dialogic, and semiotic possibilities, even when no words are involved.

## Self as Author and Hero in Verbal and Everyday Art

Life, discourse, and art are not taken as the same. Although art may be conceived as an intrinsic dimension of everyday life, there are some general notes to make about the artistic import to life from a dialogical theory, before we apply them to the self.

## Technical Fabrication

Since ancient times, art has referred critically to the technical nature of social life and, as such, it is opposed to what is given. Art involves a more or less voluntarily fabrication through which the given is transformed arbitrarily. In that sense, it allows people to contest what appears at some point to be irremediable conditions of life, at both a social and a personal level (death, illness, personal biographies, love deployment, macro-political events, macro-economic structure, among many others). Although one may say that life and art are two different domains in culture, authors such as Bakhtin (1924/1990a) and Vološinov (1926/1976) argue for their intertwinement: life becomes aesthetized and hybrid, so it is then very difficult to distinguish clearly between art and life.

# Objectification and Unification

As dialogic contestation, art is technical, not because it transforms matter (the matter of stone, canvas, scene, bodies, words, etc.), but because it refers to objective values; it is directed *axiologically* toward them (see Bakhtin, 1924/1990a). Moreover, artistic production involves the technical fabrication of a unity, an individualized and objectified object of an otherwise diverse stream of social life. Artistic productions, therefore, involve, through the manipulation of matter, the production of aesthetic objects; that is, transformation of the complex streams of chaotic and dialogical, meaningful and axiological relations in which we are co-participants, in objects of reflection, contemplation, and analysis: "Form, embracing content *from outside, externalizes it, that is, embodies it"* (Bakhtin, 1924/1990a, p. 221, emphasis in the original). Thus, art, insofar as it externalizes, allows subjects to contemplate as objects parts of their own stream of social life (see Cupchik, 2002), which Bakhtin refers to as extra-position, outside-situatedness (Bakhtin, 1924/1990a) or *outsideness* (Bakhtin, 1920–23/1990b). Through this process, intimate and assumed worldviews are made strange, rendering them more clearly visible against moral, axiological, and ideological backgrounds. This general statement of Bakhtin's theory of discourse is confronted from his early works to the problem of the self, for instance, discussing how autobiographical genres deal with the impossibility of closing or finishing oneself, with the radical difference between author and hero, in terms of what we may call the discursive techniques of alterity.

## Art as Actively Appropriated

It is particularly interesting, and useful in terms of what we are considering, that Bakhtin (1924/1990a) erases the boundaries between artist and spectator (see also Sundararajan and Raina, 2016). To contemplate is not to have an external cognition of the aesthetic object, but rather to become an author, appropriating that object and responding to it; that is, establishing dialogical relations with this new whole that would otherwise continue as a stream.

#### Juxtaposition of Alterity

Aesthetical experience, from this point of view, is related to form and its sensuality: dynamic events appear to us as objects because a given relation between form and matter refracts and redirects in specific ways to concrete shared and assumed axiological and ideological horizons. The sensual property of a given aesthetic object, however, is not selfsufficient; rather, it depends upon historical and previous connections to meaningful life that form/matter used to have in a given social group. Aesthetical objects, through their sensual properties, refract, and redirect in new, often unconventional and contradictory, ways, as they typically mix in arbitrary and creative ways forms originally referred to as different spheres of axiological life.

#### Inner Dialogicality

Although form is a crucial aspect of language activity (see Bertau, 2011, on "phenomenality" of language), the particular artistic and aesthetic dimension of language is not its sensuality, but the fact that in the use of language, and in some more than others, different language uses, voices, perspectives, and so forth, are artificially and simultaneously juxtaposed, representing aesthetically the multiplicity of discursive life, accentuating ideological and axiological tension, and objectifying dialogicality in order to be experienced as such (see Bakhtin, 1934–35/1981). What ensues is that neither is every use of language artistic, nor is art something that involves only professional artists (see Glǎveanu, 2011 and Tateo, 2017): as we use different speech genres to communicate with one another and to relate to ourselves (see Larrain and Haye, 2012), we often, without noticing and on a daily basis, use artistic utterances to deal with relevant aspects of social life that benefit from the production of aesthetic objects out of the stream of discourse and social life, and estrange ourselves from them. Every one of us organizes our life at some point, whether playing and/ or listening to music, writing and/or reading stories, novels or poems, watching movies and series, and painting or enjoying exhibitions, theatre or dance performances, among others. These cultural practices cross our daily lives, penetrating them so deeply (see Bakhtin, 1924/1990a) that they also penetrate, transform, and constitute our psychological functioning from within. We engage in artistic or aesthetic modes of being, not just as individuals interacting with other individuals, but also as a mode of relating with ourselves.

## EVERYDAY AESTHETICAL PRACTICES OF THE SELF

Self, as something that is felt as unitary, can be conceived of as an aesthetic effect; self refers to the emotionally unified experience through the creation of an aesthetic object. This is not to argue that self is an illusion (Hood, 2012); rather, it is a constant effect of the artistic dimension of discourse, through outer and inner speech. It endures as a feeling of unity because of the repetitive and normative character of social life, which must be constantly performed. Effect here is used following James as an emergent tendency. It does not mean that self is causally produced as something, as an entity, but that the feeling of unity is an emergent tendency that is aesthetic in nature: we experience ourselves as aesthetic objects, as consummated unities; we experience our dialogicality responding to it as an aesthetic whole. The artistic manipulation of form/matter through which the dialogicality of life is immersed, we presuppose, is technically and arbitrarily presented in accentuated tension as an object outside us, as a *strange* that we can contemplate and appropriate. By doing so, we are emotionally engaged in new ways but as a unified and emotionally resolved active contemplator. Artistic expression creates its public in the sense that it emotionally unifies it, resolving (not dissolving) the diversity of its multilayered and dynamic experience.

For instance, when accounting of ourselves explicitly by telling our life stories in therapy, when we first meet a friend or lover, or when we are troubled, trying to understand something about our lives, we construct not just our history, articulating our past and present (memory) with our desired futures (imagination), but ourselves as characters, as aesthetic objects. By doing so, we make ourselves objects of our experience (duplicating ourselves in author and hero), and doing it, so that others and ourselves can contemplate us in a given emotional way. We are in relative control of the story and intentionally we can pick up aspects of our life and juxtapose them with others that are arbitrarily picked up and that changes according to our interlocutors, social situations, and goals. However, we do this to produce emotions not just in others but mostly in ourselves. Often the consequence of this storytelling is relief and sympathy. Relief is because we confirm that we are not given, but we can choose the literature in which we want to live; that we can fictionally and imaginatively repair our past and project our futures in a playful way, which has this concrete emotional consequence. Sympathy is because we can engage with ourselves, experience ourselves, take an attitude of understanding to ourselves, and respond to ourselves in a sympathetic way. By telling our life stories we can transform the way we feel about ourselves. Again, this artistic everyday life activity plays a crucial role when falling in love: passing long hours talking about ourselves involves discovering new ways in which we can experience ourselves as characters, and through the appreciation and interest of others in them, we can appreciate ourselves too. Something similar happens in some therapeutic interactions: we are guided to tell our life stories in such a way that we distance from and experience ourselves in generative and often contradictory ways, that is, aesthetically. For instance, at some points, we need to acknowledge painful and dark aspects of ourselves, which we are ashamed of, but we do it with a sympathetic and forgiving attitude.

We tell life stories frequently, but not always; indeed, this is not the only way in which we create ourselves as aesthetic objects. We also dramatize many situations in our life, positing ourselves as characters in an ongoing dramatic script, accentuating and, again, juxtaposing different pieces of our discursive life to make something highly visible, or creating a version of ourselves that others and ourselves can resonate with. These dramatizations, inscribed in other types of discursive activity and hybridized with them, unfold through not only verbal signs but also motor actions, gestures, and relations with the material scene, among others, which refract meaning in complex ways and are used to perform the drama.

We stylize our bodies through clothing and fashion, through technical interventions such as piercings, tattoos, and aesthetic surgeries, among others. We decorate our intimate spaces. Although most of the time these are non-verbal actions, they are meaningful because they refer to shared values and norms and imply positions toward them. We do it as a way to identify (see Watzlawik, 2014) and diversify from others. These are artistic productions that have the aesthetic effect of creating self. We intentionally choose diverse form/matter relationships that combine and juxtapose in new and unique ways, as a way of choosing our own literature (distancing or attaching ourselves to the one given), thus arbitrarily and intentionally producing a unified (not necessarily homogeneous) emotional experience and the feeling of self. Arguably, this is also a way to struggle with the open possibility of social rejection, repudiation, and indifference.

This is not to say that we write full autobiographies or perform full theater plays. Micro-dramatizations, micro-storytelling, and micro-stylizations are embedded in social life in a responsive dialogue through which self achieves outsideness, taking a perspective toward its blind spots and desegregated parts, while art takes relevance and seriousness from life (see Bandlamudi, 2015). Therefore, this feeling of self, as an aesthetic effect, does not endure unless we are part of routines and normative social experience in which we can recreate in new and different ways these artistic actions. The enduring feeling of self, as something that constantly changes in its emotional tonality and content, responding to the dynamic, diverse, and fragmented character of alterity, needs constant artistic activity and endless performing.

Self as an aesthetic effect involves both an ontogenetic and microgenetic dimension. It involves a microgenetic effort of creative genesis of an experience of ourselves that we have developed so far. But it can also be viewed ontogenetically. The continuous micro-work of self-creation has products (feelings of unity emotionally tonalized) over which self-creation operates. This is to say that self is historical because past creative work impacts future work. For human beings, subjectivity is plural but the microgenesis of experience involves the ontogenetic experience of an effort and a tendency after unity; this work of self is mediated by the incorporation of otherness and normativity, so that self-experience emerges from social experience; and only through self-objectivation can human beings develop enduring cultural identities, agency and a sense of personhood. Moreover, this work unfolds embedded in social practices and institutional demands that change over life. So, self as an aesthetic effect may vary in its intensity depending on life circumstances. For instance, regarding life story-telling, dramatizations, and stylizations, it is possible to think that they are intensified in transitional and liminal periods, where social and institutional conditions of life change (see Zittoun, 2008; Zittoun and Gillespie, 2015; Stenner, 2018). For instance, it is likely that adolescence and old age are periods of life in which life story-telling happens more often: in the case of the former, to distance themselves from parents and families' stories and literature, choosing their own one; and in the case of the latter, as a struggle with the disintegration derived from the progressive loss of the typical activities performed during most of life, and the death of friends and peers and, with them, the sharedness that holds selves tight.

# DISCUSSION

#### Conclusions

Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation (in the sense of Simondon, 1989) as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We take as our starting points the idea that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity, but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process and give a critical account of the sense in which we are something that we can esteem, understand, have theories of, regulate, and so on. Self as an aesthetic *effect* emphasizes self as a cultural and technical process of production, involving a product that, although not a finished substance or entity, is felt as unitary and *mine* by virtue of a specific transformation of experience that should not be taken for granted, or as natural. The aesthetic dimension of experience, associated as it is with the creation of new forms and the production of objects as finished wholes, could be a key piece in the effort to account for self. Self entails not only the process of becoming (dialogical, normative, performative, discursive, and artistic) but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. The effect of self in experience must be regarded as neither a passing feeling nor an isolated microgenetic operation (e.g., the representation by the author of an utterance within the utterance) but as an ontogenetic activity that is a real continuity of experience with varying degrees of selfhood production at different moments, even if unconscious and not represented at any given point. The individuation of living-speaking beings is a social process that has, along its unfolding, real consequences in the subjective organization of experience. In this context, our contention is closer to biosemiotics (see Thibault, 2017) than constructionism (Gergen, 1991). The work of self is not just an invention of modern subjectivity (c.f. Taylor, 1989) but a culturally diverse aspect of experience marked, we argue, by outsideness and the temporal density of becoming. The feeling of being self is not univocal but *singular*: possibly in an infinite number of forms the ontogenesis is constantly resumed, reappropriated, and transformed in microgenesis, forms that are sensible and which, at some points, give a strong feeling of this effort.

Self is an elusive concept because its reference is not an entity, the reflexive individuality of subjective experience, but a problem to be addressed without possible resolution. As such, we may define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity in psychological individuation, and, on a different level, as a twofold subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as an experienced (failure of) identity.

#### Implications

We have argued for a conception of self as a dialogical operation in which diverse positionings, ideas, perspectives toward different and contradictory aspects of social life, are effortfully and endlessly articulated. In doing so, we see self in a dialogical way that is different to that first proposed by Hermans et al. (1992) and developed by Hermans and colleagues. According to them, self is "a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I positions in an imaginal landscape" (p. 23). The idea is that these I positions move from one position to another, endowing them with voices that establish dialogical relations (dialogues between characters) with a narrative structure. Dialogical here is understood as the narrative dialogue through which different characters, or imagined and provisional positions, change information regarding their worldviews. We, on the contrary, take the idea that self-dialogicality consists not in the dialogue between I positions, but in its responsive structure: self is dialogical because it involves the operation of taking oneself as an object of experience, something that is enabled by the structure of alterity. However, self is also dialogical because the structure of alterity involves two parties and a third that acts as a point of reference toward which any experience of oneself becomes a proper experience: an attitude, an emotional stance toward oneself, given an axiological socially shared horizon. Finally, self is dialogical because it is constantly performed in social interdependence, addressed to others' recognition and rendering self-closure never achieved. Moreover, although Hermans et al. (1992) give a clear role to imagination in dialogical self-theory, it is mostly in the form of imagined characters and *I* positions. Self as an aesthetic effect involves imagination as an active process of ongoing creation, in which virtual aspects of experience take a central role, even when they are not always represented.

Contrary to the available perspectives (see Brown, 2001), and in accordance with Tateo (2017), we have argued for the artistic dimension of everyday discursive life, discussing the separation between discourse and art, the latter traditionally understood as a separate and isolated sphere of cultural activity. This is a conflicting and debatable position, particularly because art is related to aesthetic values: not every artistic production is a work of art. However, art is not the same as a work of art, and the former should not be defined by the latter. Artistic productions may have different cultural values, but this does not remove them from art as a practice. We define art as the technical and thus an arbitrary and culturally variable fabrication of an aesthetic object that involves the intentional juxtaposition of different

#### REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. (1934–35/1981). "The discourse in the novel" in *The dialogical imagination.* (transl. by Emerson, C., and Holquist, M). ed. M. Holquist (Texas: University of Texas Press), 259–422. (Original work published 1934–1935).

worldviews, independent of the aesthetic value of that object. In this sense of the term, art is part of everyday life. We sustain the idea that the doing of self is a kind of art, although not in the same way that plastic or performative arts participate in aesthetic production. We contend that subjects are part of the self-production of experience within social individuation drifts, a self-production that is not a subject or a self in the order of beings but a creative process in the order of becoming.

One limitation of this initial sketch of a theory of self is the scarce consideration given to power, something that has been identified as difficult using Bakhtin's theory in cultural psychology (Sullivan, 2007), which should take into account power and normativity when theorizing about subjective life. In this case, the historical organization and validation of some subjects over others, which operate through normativity, frame the artistic possibilities of a given participant in discursive life. They therefore determine the aesthetic and emotional content of a given self. However, this determination is never complete, precisely because normativity is not monological and divested of inner dialogicality. In this context, power is related not just to the determination, limitation, or subjection of the subject but more radically to the technical implications of aesthetic activity to understand the political aspects of self.

Further research may show that an ontogenetic and dialogical theory of self is better prepared to account for transformations in normative and subjective constituents of experience, compared to theories of self as system or autonomous agency, for instance, showing the role of aesthetics and power in becoming gendered, classed, or racialized.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

AL co-led the research, drafted the first version of the manuscript, and reviewed the final one. AH co-led the research and drafted the second version of the manuscript.

#### FUNDING

AH's work was supported by the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), grant FONDAP 15110006 from the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT).

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank Amanda George for her proofreading.

Bakhtin, M. (1952–53/1986a). "The problem of speech genres" in *Speech genres and other late essays.* (transl. by McGee, V. W). eds. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Texas: University of Texas Press), 60–101. (Original work published 1952–1953).

Bakhtin, M. (1974/1986b). "Toward a methodology for the human sciences" in *Speech genres and other late essays.* (transl. by McGee, V. W). eds. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Texas: University of Texas Press), 159–172. (Original work published 1974).


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Larrain and Haye. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Moments of Pleasure: A Preliminary Classification of Gustatory *mmms* and the Enactment of Enjoyment During Infant Mealtimes

#### Sally Wiggins\*

Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

#### *Edited by:*

Pirkko Liisa Raudaskoski, Aalborg University, Denmark

#### *Reviewed by:*

Francesco Arcidiacono, Haute École Pédagogique BEJUNE, Switzerland Alessandra Fasulo, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom

*\*Correspondence:* Sally Wiggins sally.wiggins.young@liu.se

#### *Specialty section:*

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

*Received:* 20 February 2019 *Accepted:* 31 May 2019 *Published:* 02 July 2019

#### *Citation:*

Wiggins S (2019) Moments of Pleasure: A Preliminary Classification of Gustatory mmms and the Enactment of Enjoyment During Infant Mealtimes. Front. Psychol. 10:1404. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01404 The enjoyment of food and the sharing of mealtimes is a normative cultural and social practice. Empirical research on eating enjoyment has, however, been a rather neglected area across the social sciences, often marginalized in favor of health or focusing on individual preferences rather than shared enjoyment. Even with regards to children, their enjoyment of food is typically rated retrospectively via parental reports of mealtime behavior. What is missing is an understanding of how enjoyment becomes a normative, cultural practice during mealtimes. This paper examines this issue in the context of parents feeding their 5–8-month-old infants in the family home, since it is within this context that we can see the early emergence of such practices in often highly routinized situations. The enactment of eating as enjoyable, and of the food as appreciated or "liked" in some way, is a culturally normative practice that becomes recognizable through particular non-lexical ("mmm," "ooh") or lexical ("this is nice, isn't it?") utterances. The data comprise 66 infant mealtimes video-recorded over almost 19 h, from five families living in Scotland. The analysis uses discursive psychology and focuses on the sequential position of different types of parental gustatory mmms as produced during the infant meals. A classification of four types of mmm were identified in the corpus announcement, receipting, modeling, and encouragement mmms—each associated with features of sequential and multimodal organization within the mealtime. In the majority of instances, mmms were uttered alone with no other assessment terms, and parents typically produced these as an orientation to the enjoyment of their infants', rather than their own, eating practices. The receipting mmms, for instance, occurred at the precise moment when the infant's mouth closed around the food. It is argued that eating enjoyment can be considered as much an interactional practice as an individual sensation, and that non-lexical vocalizations around food are an essential part of sensory practices. The paper thus aims to bridge the gap between cultural and psychological studies of eating enjoyment and contribute to developmental studies of infant feeding in everyday interaction.

Keywords: infants, gustatory *mmms*, enjoyment, eating, complementary feeding, discursive psychology

# INTRODUCTION

To enjoy one's food, and to share food with other people, can be one of the daily pleasures in life. We might not always enjoy what we eat, but there is a widespread assumption that enjoyment should play an important role in our consumption of food. Cultural greetings used when commencing eating orient toward enjoyment (e.g., "bon appétit" "smaklig") and restaurant staff may ask customers if they enjoyed their meal. Despite this normative orientation to enjoyment, there is surprisingly little research that examines enjoyment or pleasure as these become relevant during eating practices. One could argue that health issues around food have been prioritized over enjoyment, and that the two categories (health, pleasure) have been treated as antagonistic to one another. The pleasurable aspects of eating have taken second place in empirical research. Where they have been studied, the focus on individual aspects of enjoyment and the related concepts of "liking" and "food preferences" have taken precedence. While sociological and anthropological work considers the social and cultural aspects of enjoyment, these too have received limited attention to date and have yet to examine how enjoyment becomes a social object.

To help redress this balance, the current paper examines one of the processes through which enjoyment becomes an interactional practice and a social phenomenon. While not denying individual dimensions of enjoyment, the aim instead is to examine those moments in which enjoyment is enacted, to begin to understand how food and eating becomes enjoyable. In particular, the focus is on those moments during infants' first experiences of solid foods (during "weaning" or "complementary feeding," when they are around 5–8 months old), since it is here that they learn what it is to eat, not just to feed. As such, the paper aims to provide a bridge between cultural and individual perspectives on enjoyment. By focusing on the interaction between parent and child, enjoyment can be examined as a relevant social action that becomes available at key moments in eating practices. Moreover, this orientation is brought about primarily through an embodied, non-lexical vocalization—the gustatory mmm—and so provides a further contribution to work on the interactional organization of sensory practices.

# On Eating Enjoyment Across the Social Sciences

The theoretical promiscuity of "enjoyment" and its ability to traverse many disciplines—from philosophy to physiology means that it is a rather fluid concept even though there are core features that are fairly consistent. With regards to eating, one can define enjoyment as an experience, sensation, or perception of food or eating practices that is positively evaluated in some way. There is often an assumed physiological element, and so enjoyment of eating is typically conceptualized as an individualized experience with its locus in the physical body. Its various synonyms—pleasure, hedonism, liking—have been more meticulously examined, and at times these are used interchangeably with enjoyment in the literature. The concept of hedonism, for example, while being centuries-old, only gained attention in psychological research on eating behavior after the apparent demise of behaviorist notions of reinforcement (Bolles, 2014). While clearly related to enjoyment, it is nevertheless important to distinguish these concepts, since—like "food preference"—research into taste hedonics has been more firmly situated within individual taste experiences and consumption behavior (e.g., Cox et al., 2016).

The fluidity of enjoyment is not in itself problematic, since it provides for a variety of research perspectives: some treat enjoyment as intellectual or social pleasure, for instance, rather than physiologically, or sensory-based. Nor is it always necessary to isolate a particular term ("enjoyment") as distinctive from another ("pleasure"). What is argued, however, is that there is a tendency across the cultural and behavioral sciences to prioritize an individual locus of enjoyment at the expense of an interactional or social perspective (see also Wiggins, 2002). When "enjoyment" is used synonymously with "liking," for instance, then there is a risk that only individual ratings or experiences of enjoyment will be studied. Problems arise when methodological practices do not match the theoretical assumptions. Even those who highlight the shared nature of enjoyment have yet to examine how this enjoyment becomes realized in specific social contexts.

The tendency toward an individualistic focus is compounded by the limited research that exists across psychology and the social sciences on the enjoyment of eating. The topic barely gets a mention in psychology of food and eating textbooks, unless as part of the pleasure vs. control dichotomy seen in models of health behavior and disordered eating (Ogden, 2010; see also next section). It has become marginalized as an emotional or affective response to eating. Psychologists have typically shied away from enjoyment as a topic that is too "subjective" for scientific studies of eating (though see research on recognition of a "genuine" enjoyment smile; Giudice and Colle, 2007). Even the broader area of taste, as one of the core senses through which we might experience enjoyment, has had a remarkably short analytical history. It was originally considered too closely related to carnal desires or relatively inaccessible in terms of shared experiences (McQuaid, 2015). We can make comparisons between what others see, hear or touch, for instance, but our tastes are seemingly more private and unique (cf. Spence, 2017). In short, psychologists have typically avoided the area of eating enjoyment, favoring instead the cognitivistic and physiological concepts of food preference or sensory hedonics and blurring the distinction between "liking" and "preference" (Mela, 2006). It is not pleasure that is typically being studied, but rather individual preferences for one type of food over another (Eccleston, 2016).

In sociology and anthropology, enjoyment of eating has also been largely overlooked (Warde and Martens, 2000; Warde, 2016), though here there is a broader consideration of social aspects, such as how the enjoyment of one person may be reliant on that of another. When eating out at a restaurant, for example, people's behaviors might be adapted so as not to detract from the enjoyment of others (Warde and Martens, 2000). Enjoyment of the food can therefore be more than just sensory pleasure, but also social pleasure of enjoying food in the company of others. There are rituals that might be followed to indicate pleasure—noises of satisfaction to show one's appreciation (such as burping) or words of appreciation—when eating food provided by another (Visser, 2017). One person's enjoyment is dependent on enjoyment for all (Warde and Martens, 2000). Examining "enjoyment" is often done through questionnaire or interviews after the meal, identifying broad patterns but relying on parental accounts of the meal (e.g., Skafida, 2013). As with psychological literature, the focus in sociological and anthropological studies has tended to rest on "taste" as either personal preferences or cultural capital. Ochs et al. (1996) on socializing taste, for instance, noted cultural differences between Italian and American families in terms of conversations about the enjoyable aspects of eating. While the synaesthetic and social aspects of taste have been argued (Korsmeyer and Sutton, 2011), there is a lack of research that examines moments of tasting in mundane social settings. The physiological aspects of eating the visceral processes of ingestion, for instance—have been, until quite recently, largely avoided (Warde, 2016).

# On Prioritizing Health Over Pleasure

The limited research focus on eating enjoyment may be due, in part, to the prevailing concern across the social and behavioral sciences with food and health. Given that our eating practices are one of the primary influences on our health and wellbeing, this is perhaps not surprising. The problem, however, is that the pleasures of eating have typically been positioned as opposing health, sometimes referred to as the asceticism vs. consumption dialectic, in resisting, or embracing the pleasures of eating (Lupton, 1996). Discourses of health have often been contrasted with indulgence, in that to control one's eating is contrasted with eating for pleasure (Warde, 1997). The coupling of abstinence and food has a long history: early Christianity was caught between norms around sharing of food, while also controlling the types and amounts of food to be eaten (Coveney, 2014). Enjoying one's food has thus been overshadowed by principles of civilizing appetites (Mennell, 1987) and controlling bodies (Ogden, 2010). In food advertising, health and enjoyment are even treated as mutually exclusive categories, with foods being targeted as either what parents want (healthy food) compared to what children want (enjoyable food; Burridge, 2009).

This dichotomy has further propounded the notion of eating enjoyment as primarily an individual characteristic, as a pleasurable sensory or experiential state of being, rather than as something that might be shared together. Similarly, prevailing discourses of health often foreground individual responsibilities, control and abstinence (Vogel and Mol, 2014). Whether eating food for health and for pleasure, both have typically been characterized within a psychological, individual framework. To enjoy food is thus to embrace the sensory pleasures of food. As noted earlier, this is too close to sexual pleasure for some researchers: the senses of taste, smell, and touch have been marginalized compared to those perception or hearing, at least within psychology (Eccleston, 2016). Even within the literature on food and health, the pleasures of food have been underexplored. As noted by Coveney and Bunton (2003, p. 162), "pleasure lurks in the background of western thought like a ghostly shadow; neither fully present nor fully absent."

There are some, however, who are beginning to challenge this constructed division between health and pleasure (Mol, 2012; Cornil and Chandon, 2016). The moralistic undercurrent that runs through this dichotomy is explored in Vogel and Mol (2014) account of dieting advice in the Netherlands, in which a small group of dieticians are promoting self-care and mindfulness (is this food good for me?) rather than restraint and punishment (am I being good?). Focusing on the sensory pleasures of food was also found, experimentally, to lead people to eat less while enjoying the food more (Cornil and Chandon, 2016). What is becoming clear, therefore, is that eating enjoyment has been a neglected research area across the social sciences, characterized primarily in terms of individual pleasure and marginalized in favor of health. These patterns continue as we focus more closely now on how eating enjoyment has been considered within children's eating practices.

# On Children's Enjoyment of Eating

That children might enjoy food, and that this enjoyment might be crucial to understanding their eating practices, has long been evidenced in the child feeding literature (e.g., Cooke et al., 2003; van der Horst, 2012). In this research area, however, enjoyment has rarely been examined as a concept per se (Marty et al., 2018). It has instead been treated as synonymous with food preference, a psychological concept that has been more strongly associated with individual traits and measured through children's "liking" of food (see also Mela, 2006, for discussion of the blurring of these concepts).

It is worth considering how enjoyment is typically measured in this field, since these methodological practices highlight the focus on the individualistic aspects of enjoyment. The literature in this area has to date relied heavily on parental responses, through either quantified scores (questionnaires) or verbal accounts (interviews), occasionally supplemented with video observations. In the widely used Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ, Wardle et al., 2001), for instance, children's "enjoyment of food" is scored through parental responses to the following four questionnaire items: "my child loves food," "my child is interested in food," "my child looks forward to mealtimes," and "my child enjoys eating." Each of these items is rated according to the following options: never, rarely, sometimes, often, always. Research using the CEBQ has tended to show that higher rates of eating enjoyment are correlated with eating more, and a greater variety of foods (van der Horst, 2012). If parents use rewards, persuasion, or pressure to eat, then enjoyment is likely to be reduced (Finnane et al., 2017). Even with infants, the CEBQ was used to demonstrate that there is little difference in enjoyment of food regardless of whether spoon-feeding or baby-led weaning is used (Brown and Lee, 2015).

The focus on parental responses has been for good reason, since it is parents who are largely in control of their children's feeding, particularly in the early years. Infant feeding research has begun to make greater use of video recordings and observations to examine parents' responses to infant gestures (Hetherington, 2017). This work has been important in highlighting the social and interactional aspects of feeding children, and of the subtle cues in facial gestures that are used by parents to determine their child's eating practices, particularly during complementary feeding of young infants (Hetherington et al., 2016). In examining children's facial expressions separately to parental responses, enjoyment of a food is conceptualized primarily as individualistic, such as a biophysiological, cognitive or experiential event. Much of the research in infant feeding therefore seeks to gain objective measures of enjoyment. This is why in some studies of observed infant feeding, parents are asked to wear a mask over their mouth and refrain from talking, so that infants' expressions "were a reflection of their hedonic responses to the food rather than imitation of their mother's facial expressions" (Forestell and Mennella, 2012, p. 1139).

One could conclude, therefore, that the infant feeding research typically examines children's enjoyment of food by asking parents retrospectively whether, and how much, they think their children enjoy their meals. There are a number of concerns with this. First, it focuses attention on parental assessment rather than children's assessment and assumes that another person can make an accurate judgment of this on the basis of a self-report questionnaire item. Second, it treats enjoyment as an overall assessment of "typical" behavior at mealtimes; the contextual specifics of particular meals or foods are thus lost. Third, it is open to response bias as to expectations that meals should be enjoyable (parents may thus respond more positively). Fourth, as with many questionnaire formats around feeding, there is no option for participants to expand on their responses and to provide details as to what it is that makes the meal enjoyable, nor how or when the enjoyment becomes relevant.

# On Enjoyment as an Interactional Practice Within Infant Mealtimes

To summarize, there is a paucity of research on eating enjoyment across the social sciences, and even less that focuses on enjoyment as a social practice. With regards to children, very little is known about how the pleasures of food become part of their eating practices. The current paper therefore examines the earliest moments of infant feeding to contribute to this area and to help bridge the gap between cultural and psychological research on eating enjoyment. The analysis also has relevance for conversation analytic and developmental psychology work on caregiver-infant interaction, particularly during weaning, and for emerging work on sensory practices in interaction.

As noted above, video observational work on infantfeeding interactions has received limited attention to date. A few notable studies of mother-infant dyads have begun to detail the mechanics of weaning in terms of the embodied coordination of parent and child (Negayama, 1993; van Dijk et al., 2012; Toyama, 2013, 2014; Costantini et al., 2018). These studies note the fluctuations of feeding interactions and of the increasing coordination of mothers' arm movements and infants' mouth movements. Drawing on the concept of synchrony in caregiver-infant behavior, clear patterns in non-verbal behavior were noted (Costantini et al., 2018). For instance, mothers often opened their own mouths in eating-like movements just at the moment when infants themselves were eating (Negayama, 1993; Toyama, 2013). As weaning progressed, infants opened their mouths before the spoon approached, and the fluidity of spoonto-mouth-and-removed increased (van Dijk et al., 2012; Toyama, 2014). Other observational research on infant feeding has also begun to examine the role of infants' eye gaze in the coordination of feeding (Kochukhova and Gredebäck, 2010) and indicators of hunger orsatiety (McNally et al., 2019). The current paper adds to this collection by examining the verbal (specifically, non-lexical sounds) of the parents alongside the embodied movements of hands, spoons, and food.

Eating enjoyment, considered here as an interactional practice, can also be understood as part of a range of embodied behaviors that are intersubjective and observable phenomena (Majid and Levinson, 2011) through the ways in which they are interactionally organized (Mondada, 2018). In this way, the paper aims to contribute to emerging linguistics work on "sensory practices," rather than senses per se (e.g., Guth and Runte, 2017; Mann, 2018). Previous discursive work on food pleasure has begun to examine how the enjoyment of food can be understood theoretically as an interactional achievement; something that is worked-up and collaboratively produced in talk rather than an automatic process (Wiggins, 2002; Sneijder and te Molder, 2006).

The analysis in this paper focuses on the occurrence of nonlexical vocalizations during the weaning process and thus also contributes to work on sound objects in everyday conversational English (Reber, 2012). Specifically, it is the gustatory mmm that is of interest, distinguished by its extended and emphasized form, typically lasting longer than a continuer or other form of "mm" in conversation and as accompanying eating and/or drinking episodes. In earlier work on this (Wiggins, 2002), only audio recordings were used and no attention was paid to the distinction between who was uttering the mmm, nor where this was placed sequentially within the meal. The current work also specifically examines the gustatory mmm in the context of caregiver-infant interaction during mealtimes. As Mondada (2009) has noted, food evaluations may appear at certain moments: when food is offered, when there is a closing down of a topic, and at "delicate" points in which conflict may be occurring. Just as it is overly simplistic to assume that parents' questionnaire ratings can provide an accurate account of infants' presumed enjoyment of food, so is it also simplistic to equate the gustatory mmm with an enjoyable experience. It is important to stress, therefore, that this is not the point. The gustatory mmm is not being used as a shorthand indicator of a putative internal state. It is, by contrast, examined in terms of how it enacts eating as enjoyable at specific points in mealtime interaction. That is, that the food is oriented to as something that can be enjoyed and that this is produced as an observable and socially-relevant object in interaction.

The aims of this paper are therefore to examine where, when and how the parental gustatory mmm - as an embodied non-lexical vocalization that orients to food as being enjoyable—is produced during mealtimes with infants between 5 and 8 months old.

# METHODS

#### Data and Participants

The data comprises video recordings from five families living in Scotland, who recorded the occasions in which they fed their infants over a period of 2–3 weeks during the summer of 2014; these are referred to as the "infant meals." Participating families were recruited via a short advertisement on a university online noticeboard; families were either university staff or students, or who had heard about the study through university colleagues. There was no payment for participation, though each family was provided with a DVD containing short clips from their recorded meals. Each family was provided with two small video cameras, memory cards and tripods, and instructed on how to set up the cameras so that both the infants' and parental faces could be captured simultaneously. One family (#5) requested to use their own mobile devices to record their meals, and these were typically very short, often just a few minutes of spoon-feeding their infant a snack while seated in a baby walker. All parents were asked to record as many of their infant's meals as possible during the recording period, to become accustomed to the video camera and to collect a variety of meals (e.g., different times of the day). The only demographic information collected about the families were the ages of the parents and the infant. As far as the researcher was aware, the infants had no clinical feeding problems or dietary restrictions.

## Coding and Analytical Procedure

Across the five families, 66 meals were recorded, with a total of almost 19 h of video data from infant meals. Families #1 and #2 (see **Table 1**) used baby-led weaning, in which their infants were more autonomous in their feeding and provided with small pieces of food rather than a solely spoon-fed diet. Following data collection, the full set of video recordings were searched manually for all and any references to enjoyment of food, whether through lexical ("did you enjoy that") or non-lexical ("mmm") embodied sounds. As noted previously, an orientation to enjoyment can be made through various means, such as references to the food being "yummy," gustatory mmms, lip smacks, or other non-lexical sounds such as "ooh," "ah," or an audible in- or out-breath with pursed lips (similar to an "ooh" but as a breathy sound rather than a vocalization). When interacting with infants and small children, the onomatopoeic sound "nom-nom" might also be used. It is important to note that although the infants are able to produce non-lexical sounds themselves, this study focuses on parental use of gustatory mmms as orientations toward enjoyment or pleasure. Coding of the data was undertaken by the researcher alone, with each instance of a lexical or non-lexical orientation to enjoyment noted in terms of its form (e.g., "mmm," "ooh," or lip smacks) and timepoint within each meal. The coding was conducted manually, through careful viewing of all videorecordings within the corpus, and inclusive, noting borderline cases such as "mms" that were not necessarily gustatory. In the interests of analytical focus, however, only the gustatory mmms are included in this paper.

All sections of the data which featured instances of the parental gustatory mmm were then identified and transcribed, including the sequential turns immediately prior to, and following, the mmm. A gustatory mmm was coded as "standalone" if there was a pause of one second or more between the mmm and further assessments, or as "mmm + assessment" if there was an assessment token (such as "nice," "yummy") immediately after the mmm. These sequences were then analyzed using discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Wiggins, 2017), an analytical approach that examines how psychological concepts (such as enjoyment) are discursively constructed and used in social interaction. The analysis focused on the form of the mmms, where they were positioned in the meal and in relation to non-verbal, embodied practices (such as handling spoons, chewing food or using hands to pick up objects). It is important to distinguish this kind of analysis from other ways of coding feeding practices, which focus on categorizing parental behavior into "prompts," for example. By contrast, discursive psychology focuses on the interaction between parent and child, and examines talk not only in terms of its sequential and contextual placement, but also through participants' rather than analysts' orientations. This means that the gustatory mmms were not treated as a uniform category of, for example, modeling, or prompts to eat food, but instead were examined in terms of how they were used or oriented to by participants.

## Ethics

Working with data involving small children and video recordings from family homes clearly generates ethical issues, particularly around consent, and the use of data extracts. Ethical approval was first acquired from the University of Strathclyde ethics committee before embarking on the research. Participating families were then recruited through posters and a university emailing list, with a particular focus on those families who were weaning their first child. All prospective parents were then contacted and met in person to discuss the study, and full written consent was obtained from all parents involved. Moreover, parents had full control over the video cameras and recordings; they alone set up the cameras (the researcher never visited the participant homes), took the recordings, and had the opportunity to review and delete any recordings that they did not wish to be used. Parents also gave consent to use anonymized still images or video clips for academic publications and presentations.

# RESULTS

The format and sequential positioning of gustatory mmms in the infant meals was found, in most cases, to follow a clear pattern, indicating specific moments at which parents oriented to enjoyment of the food or meal. In particular, just over half of the mmms occurred at the precise point in which the infant's mouth closed around a spoonful or handful of food, thereby situating enjoyment as an immediate embodied and gustatory experience. The results section will first overview the number and format of mmms across the five families before detailing the sequential positioning and the construction of enjoyment. **Table 1** specifies the number and format of mmms identified across the full corpus, with details of how many were identified for each of the five families.



TABLE 2 | Classification of gustatory mmms across the data corpus.


A few points are worth highlighting here. First, as noted earlier, families #1 and #2 used a baby-led weaning approach, which meant that they often ate their own meals alongside their child or else supervised the infants' self-feeding while doing other activities nearby (e.g., cleaning or tidying the kitchen). Although no conclusions can be made on the basis of two families, the difference in the overall time taken for meals is notable; when infants fed themselves, the meals lasted much longer. Second, all but one of the mmms was used in the context of eating or orienting to food; the odd one out was produced when the infant was drinking water. Third, all of the mmms followed a similar prosodic pattern, with an emphasized and prolonged "mm" sound, sometimes with rising or falling intonation (or both), and all uttered with a closed mouth; in some instances, the sound was elongated or exaggerated.

Confirming a pattern noted in previous research (Wiggins, 2002), the gustatory mmms were overwhelmingly "standalone" (215 out of 273 instances, around 80%), uttered in first position without any preceding or following lexical item, or clarification regarding the role or purpose of the mmm. As such, they were characterized by spontaneity, immediacy, and vagueness: they could be spontaneously produced without any prefacing or pre-announcement, were located immediately at the start of a turn in talk, and were typically unaccompanied without any explanation about the source of the enjoyment. Unlike previous research on mmms, however, the analysis considered the distinction between object-side and subject-side assessments (Edwards and Potter, 2017), and as can be seen from the table there is almost an exclusive presence of object-side assessments. That enjoyment is often conflated specifically with "liking" in the child feeding literature is therefore of concern. While the lack of subject-side assessments does not mean that mmms could not indicate an infant's liking of a food, the findings here suggest that something else is going on with regards to mmms and orienting to enjoyment that relates more to the assessment of the food than to personal preferences.

The table above provides an overview of the number and form of mmms but no sense of how they were situated within infant meals nor what their purpose or consequences might follow. To investigate further, therefore, the mmms were examined in terms of how and where they were sequentially positioned within the meals. Four different types of gustatory mmms were noted and were classified in the following way:


**Table 2** presents the distribution of the four types of gustatory mmms across the corpus.

The four types of gustatory mmm are distinguished in terms of their immediate contextual features rather than their form; there are some differences in prosody and duration of type three and four mmms but otherwise they are fairly consistent. They have been presented in this order, rather than the most prevalent first, since the order mirrors the relative placement within a meal (from the introduction of food, to first taste, to consumption). Each of these mmm contexts will now be discussed and illustrated in turn.

#### Announcement *mmm*

The first location of a gustatory mmm occurs at a point in which a food is first introduced or announced to the infant. These typically occurred in the data corpus at the beginning of the meal, but could also be situated during the meal, when a new food item was introduced. In some cases, the announcement mmm was used in the presence of food-related accompaniments, such as bowls, or when putting on the infants' bib or strapping them into their high-chair. These food announcement mmms are similar to, but more immediate than, other types of food assessments produced when food is offered at the table (cf. Mondada, 2009). The characteristic feature of these mmms can be summarized as follows: (a) they occur at the introduction of a to-be-consumed food item or at the very start of the meal when the infant is being "prepared" for feeding, (b) the parents' eye gaze is on the food at the moment of utterance, (c) the parent is typically holding the food as the mmm is uttered. Extracts 1 and 2 below illustrate this form of gustatory mmm.

#### Extract 1: family #4, Chris (meal 2)<sup>1</sup>


#### Extract 2: family #2, Jess (meal 3)


In both extracts above, the mmms are preceded by a long pause in which an embodied sequence plays out. The parent picks up a bowl or packet with the anticipated food item inside, sometimes also stirring the food with a spoon (Extract 1, see **Figure 1**) or opening a packet (Extract 2, see **Figure 2**). In contrast to most other mmms (where parental eye gaze is almost always on the infant), the parental eye gaze during these gustatory mmms was partially or fully on the food item. In extract 2, Mum's eye gaze flicks from the food item, to the infant, and then back to the food item. In doing so, she uses gaze both to orient to the food item and to invite the infant to follow her gaze.

There might have been other lexical or non-lexical terms that parents could use at this moment. There are, for example, instances in the data corpus when an audible and extended inbreath (almost, but not quite, an "ooh") is used to announce a new food, but these typically occur when it is someone else who brings the food. As such, we might speculate that such audible inbreaths enact surprise rather than enjoyment per se. By contrast, the prosodic formation of the gustatory mmm signals the arrival of the food as being a specific type of object (one that anticipates

enjoyment) or of the preparation of the meal as a preface to the enjoyable event.

The sequential positioning of these gustatory mmms is also important here, since in many cases, the food was already present near the parent (therefore the sight and smell of the food might have been noticed earlier) and is only at this moment being brought to the infant's attention as a relevant food item. The mmms then "announce" the food as next on the menu, and sometimes (as in extract 2), the name of the food is also tagged on. While no explicit assessment of the food has been given (e.g., "this mango will taste nice"), the gustatory mmm does the work of orienting to enjoyable qualities of the food without having to specify what exactly those qualities might be. What is important, instead, is that the food is enacted as anticipating enjoyment at just this point in the interaction and thus serves to foreground the relevance of the food for the infant immediately prior to eating.

#### Receipting *mmm*

The most common sequential position—accounting for around half of all gustatory mmms in the corpus—was located at the exact point in which food had been taken into the mouth,

<sup>1</sup>Pseudonyms are provided for all infants, and parents are denoted by either 'Mum' or 'Dad' for ease of reference.

either by spoon or hands, and with visible mouth closing or jaw movements. These gustatory mmms were often uttered at predictable moments, not with every mouthful of the infant, but at a recognizable point at which the taste of the food might be said to have been "received." As such, I refer to them as the receipting gustatory mmm, since they focus attention on the moment at which a taste experience might observably have begun (when the food is placed within a closing mouth) rather than on the eating process per se.

The characteristic features of these mmms were as follows: (a) they were uttered temporally when the mouth closed round the spoon or the spoon was withdrawn from the mouth, or as the child's hand with food went into the mouth, (b) parental eye gaze was always on the child's face, (c) typically following a pause or verbal silence, (d) were usually standalone mmms. These mmms occurred in the same sequential location regardless of the feeding approach, whether the parents were spoon-feeding or the infant was feeding themselves with hands or a spoon. Extracts 3 to 6 below detail this pattern; images have been used where possible to illustrate the co-ordination of hands, food and mouths.

Extract 3: family #4, Chris (meal 08)

```
1. Mum: Mummy talking nonsense again
2. (3.2) ((spoon into mouth))
3. Mum: mm↑mm:, ((figure 3))
4. (1.2) ((spoon withdrawn))
5. Mum: is that ↑nice
```
In this family, the parents used spoon-feeding, and as such the lengthy pause (line 2) is due to the time taken to guide the spoon toward the mouth and to ensure that the infant opens their mouth at the right point in which to allow the spoon to enter (cf. Toyama, 2014). Interestingly, the same silence before the mmm often occurs even in those instances in the data corpus when the infant is feeding themselves, while the parent watches the food being lifted up into the infant's mouth. Interactionally,

this auditory silence allows for a break in any talking and enables the focus to rest on physical manipulation of the food. The mmm then occurs as a turn-initial sound for the parent, though we might also treat it as the second part of a paired action, with the food placed on the tongue as the first pair-part. Indeed, it could even be a third part, with the following sequence: (1) food into mouth, (2) mouth closed around food, (3) mmm as receipt of the taste (see **Figure 3**). As such, the infant's embodied movements (closing of the mouth around the food) might be treated as a grammatical turn (Keevallik, 2018), with the tasting of the food as much a part of the interaction as the verbal utterances

(Mondada, 2018). The next extract (4) below illustrates how it is the precise moment of food going into the mouth and being accountably "received" by the infant that provides the crucial part of the timing of the mmm. In this extract, Mum has been spoon-feeding 6-month-old Lucy, who is sitting in her baby walker (a chair with tray and wheels), and as such needs to negotiate the movements of mouth, spoon, and infant.

Extract 4: Family #5, Lucy (meal 10)

```
1. Mum: here comes the ↑airplane=whoosh::
2. (3.0) ((spoon moved toward mouth,
       infant moves))
3. ((#figure 4, image 1+2))
4. Mum: mm↑mm, ((#figure 4, image 3))
5. (3.0) ((spoon retracted))
```
In this example, the silence immediately preceding the mmm is punctuated with two attempts by Mum to get the food into Lucy's mouth; see images 1 and 2 (**Figure 4**). In the first attempt, Lucy is looking up toward her Mum but the spoon does not go into the mouth and Lucy's head turns away. In the second attempt, the spoon again touches her lip but Lucy's head moves before the food goes in. It is only on the third attempt that the spoon enters the mouth, and in a swift retracting movement Mum removes the spoon while uttering the mmm (lines 3 and 4). As with the other examples, the timing of the mmm is crucial here, since it points to the closure of the mouth around the food—and thus "a successful attempt" rather than the taste of the food on the lips or other parts of the mouth.

There is evidence that the mmm works as much as an assessment term on its own (in reference to something being "good" or "nice") as much as it does a marker of enjoyment or pleasure in particular (see Wiggins, 2002). In some cases, such as extract 5 below, parents make explicit their orientation to checking their infant's assessment of the food. In this example, Jess has been eating for some time; her parents have finished their own meal and it is Dad who stays to sit with Jess and talk to her as she continues to eat. Jess is picking up and chewing food on her own with no assistance of spoons, nor does Dad pick up any pieces of food for her. This example is an illustration of how the method of eating (in this case, babyled weaning) did not make any difference with regards to the sequential organization of either announcement or receipting gustatory mmms.

of the depicted child.

Wiggins Moments of Pleasure: mmms in Infant Mealtimes

#### Extract 5: family #2, Jess (meal 1)


In this extract, Dad orients to Jess's continued eating as confirmation that the food is "good" and "yummy" (lines 1 and 6). As Jess picks up more pieces of food, for instance, Dad's assessments are in overlap. The receipting mmm then occurs as Jess's hand (with food inside) is placed into her mouth; at this point her eye gaze is directly on Dad (**Figure 5**). As before, the mmm takes place in third position: food picked up -> mouth closes around food -> gustatory mmm. Dad's explicit assessment "they're yummy" (line 6) then works to confirm the assessment verbally. In contrast to extract 3—in which the parent did an assessment check—here the assessment builds on the mmm. The various possible combinations of mmms and lexical assessment terms therefore suggests that the mmm functions as both complementary to assessments but also adding something qualitatively different.

The final example for the receipting mmm illustrates how it can be repeated soon after the first utterance. While the mmm is predominately uttered without any other assessments or lexical terms, in this example each mmm is of the form "mmm + object-side assessment." This family uses baby-led weaning and at this point in the meal Mum has just passed a rice cracker to 7-month-old Sarah who then puts into her mouth.

Extract 6: family #1, Sarah (meal 3)

1. (2.0)((Sarah bites the cracker)) 2. (5.0)((cracker out of mouth, then 3. back in again)) 4. Mum: ◦mmmm: ◦ (0.2) >nice< ((**Figure 6**, image 1)) 5. (4.0)((Sarah looks at Mum, 6. food out of mouth)) 7. Mum: mm↑mm: (.) ↑yummy ((image 2))

The recycling of the mmm can be seen to occur at just the point at which Sarah looks toward her Mum (see **Figure 6**). In extract 6, both mmms are of the form "mmm + object-side assessment" ("nice," "yummy") and thus do a little extra work to specify the focus of the utterance. The second occurrence of the mmm has a slightly rising intonation, with an almost confirmatory tone. What is important here is how they work to bind together the non-lexical mmm with the lexical and positively-loaded assessment particles. While the presence of standalone mmms is evidence that they work sufficiently well without an assessment term, the occurrence of the mmm+objectside assessment provides confirmation that the mmm is itself positively loaded.

It is worth reiterating the point that, in most cases, the parents are not eating any food themselves while producing these mmms. They are, then, an utterance produced as an explicit orientation to the assumed gustatory experiences of another person (their child). To do so at just the moment at which a mouth closes around a spoon, or a piece of food, illustrates a practice that was observed across all five families, repeatedly, and with different constellations of food, hands, and utensils. Such an observable pattern is remarkable: not only that different parents produce an utterance that attends to their infant's consumption at such a

specific time-point, but also that it is produced in such a common way with similar intonation, sequentiality, and eye gaze. In the 7 out of 143 instances which involved the parents tasting the food, the pattern remained the same: the mmm was located just as the mouth closed around the food, and eye gaze from parent was fixed on the child.

What is particularly noteworthy about these mmms was that parents always began the utterance when looking directly at their child's face, even if their gaze moved before they had finished uttering the mmm. This contrasts sharply with a study on tasting between strangers, in which mutual eye gaze between cheese shop owners and customers are avoided during the moments of tasting a piece of cheese (Mondada, 2018). In this sense, an "individual space" is created for the taster and an orientation to tasting as being something different from eating. As Mondada notes (2018, p. 754), "tasting is not a private experience, but an individual experience that has a public, witnessable, accountable, and intersubjective dimension." By contrast, the gustatory mmms found in this corpus suggest an orientation to a particular positive assessment—enjoyment—rather than opening up the interaction for a response from the infant<sup>2</sup> .

#### Modeling *mmms*

The third type of gustatory mmms occurred when parents were eating food and during which a more explicit modeling of eating enjoyment was enacted. The occasions occurred when the meal was underway and when parents were eating themselves, usually their own food but on some occasions a food that was being eaten by the infants themselves. These were less predictable in terms of their sequential placement within a mealtime, or within the feeding of the infant, but they nevertheless had the following core features: (a) were uttered when the parent themselves were eating, (b) parental eye gaze was on the child, (c) were slightly exaggerated or extended mmm, often comprising several mmms together or a combination of mmm plus another lexical or non-lexical marker (e.g., lip smacks, or "nom nom"). In some cases, the parents closed their eyes during the production of the mmm—despite having started with eye contact with the infant—and this further enabled an enactment of individual pleasure. As with many of the other mmms, they followed an extended pause during which the parent was eating. Extract 7 illustrates the ways in which these modeling mmms often comprised multiple mmm components; in this meal, Mum is eating her own breakfast while seated opposite Daisy, who has been eating for some time and is continuing to pick up small pieces of food herself:

Extract 7: family #3, Daisy (meal 8)

1. (4.0) ((Mum looks down at food)) 2. (1.6) ((Mum looks at Daisy, food into mouth, starts chewing)) 3. Mum: mmm=mmm (0.2) ↑mmm ((nodding, eye gaze on Daisy)) 4. (3.0) ((Mum stops chewing, eye gaze on Daisy)) 5. Mum: yummy yummy yummy 6. (3.0) ((Mum continued eye gaze on Daisy))

What distinguishes this mmm from a receipting mmm is that it occurs not at the point of the mouth closing around the but at the point at which the parent is visibly chewing food: this is eating, rather than tasting, food. Mum's eye gaze is fixed on Daisy from lines 2 to 6, and so the mmm is as much directed at Daisy as it might be on Mum's own sensory experiences. The repeated mmms (line 3), with slight upward intonation on the final mmm, present a more exaggerated and extended form of gustatory mmm than seen in either of the first two classifications. In this sense, this third type of mmm seems to be doing some work to "model" enjoyment of eating through the parent's own enactment of this while eating their own food. Similarly, the

<sup>2</sup>Note that there were instances in the corpus where parents asked 'what do you think?' type questions at the point of feeding, which does orient to the possibility of infant input, whether verbally or non-verbally.

three-part "yummy yummy yummy" (line 5) works to focus attention on the action being performed here as much as the assessment itself. That is, it is the doing of an assessment and its observability—the orientation to food as being "yummy"—that is important here. A single "yummy" might focus attention on the food through making an assessment, whereas a three-part "yummy" focuses attention on the assessment as a relevant thing to do at just this point in time.

The modeling of eating enjoyment might not only be considered as a way to role-model a normative practice during eating, it might also serve to encourage or motivate the infant to eat themselves. In other words, through modeling enjoyment, parents could model eating as a relevant practice. In extract 8, Jess has been eating her lunch alongside her parents, but has become agitated, stopped eating, and has begun to make crying noises. Her parents then try different actions to calm Jess and encourage her to continue eating, including Dad's extended vocalizations as he eats some of Jess's food:

Extract 8: family #2, Jess (meal 9)


Dad looks at Jess almost entirely through this sequence, other than for briefly glancing down at the food in his hands. Jess also maintains eye contact (**Figure 7**) with Dad for the duration of this sequence, having stopped crying around line 12. This rather unusual extended gustatory mmm serves to illustrate how it highlights not the food's characteristics but the enactment of enjoyment as being the relevant thing at this point in the interaction. What is key to this sequence is that Dad has visibly taken a piece of bread from the plate of food that is being passed to Jess periodically: he is eating her food. The continued eye gaze, raising up of the food to make it more visible, further serve to orient to this apparent transgression. We can also see two mmm + evaluation formulations (lines 8 and 13) that further amplify the enactment of enjoyment. That this dramatization by Dad might be a ploy to encourage Jess to eat more is then confirmed by Mum's direct offering of food to

Jess in line 17. Following this, Jess does then take the food and continue eating.

In this third type of gustatory mmm, then, parents orient directly to their own eating processes—the chewing and taste of food—by making this audibly and visibly relevant to their infants. Through eye contact at the start of the production of the mmm, they demonstrate that the mmm is a social act: not just an expression of their gustatory pleasure, but an interactionally relevant thing to do.

#### Encouragement *mmms*

The fourth type of gustatory mmm was produced at various sequential locations within the infant mealtimes, though they typically occurred when the parents also oriented to potential resistance from the child with regards to eating. For instance, when the child looked unsure about the food, spat it out, stopped chewing, or was otherwise distracted by something else. These mmms are therefore named "encouragement mmms" as they appear to be tied up with a specific social action: to encourage the infant to begin, continue, or resume eating. They had features similar to those seen in the third type (modeling mmms), though in this case, the parents were not themselves currently eating any food. Encouragement mmms were a more varied category than the previous three but can be distinguished by the following features: (a) either before (as food is being offered) or during infant eating, but typically when infant not actively or visibly chewing, (b) sometimes a more exaggerated or elongated mmm or accompanied by other lexical (yummy) or non-lexical (lip smacks) sounds, (c) parent is not chewing food themselves at this point, (d) parental eye gaze on the child, (e) often accompanied by checks with regards to taste or consumption (e.g., "do you not like that?") or when there is possible resistance to the food.

These categories were most commonly seen in families #1 and #3, at points in which the infant was eating from a spoon (held by themselves or their parents) or else were picking up small pieces of food from a tray. In extract 9, we see an example of how these encouragement mmms might accompany the immediate offer of a food to the infant.

#### Extract 9: family #1, Sarah (meal 14)


Prior to this extract, Sarah had been eating pieces of fruit while waiting for the porridge to cool; now the porridge is ready, and Mum presents this to Sarah on a spoon which she usually grasps to feed herself. At line 3, Mum holds the spoon in front of Sarah but there is no immediate uptake (line 4) which might indicate Sarah's lack of readiness to eat the food. The first mmm then works here as an encouragement to take (and eat) the porridge. Unlike the announcement mmms, which typically occur as the food is being stirred or attended to before presentation to the infant, this encouragement mmm happens as part of the offering of food. It is slightly shorter and less exaggerated in this case unlike some other encouragement mmms (see extract 11) but still in initial turn-position and following a brief pause. As such, the mmm works more as an assessment of the food to encourage the infant to eat it, rather than anticipation at enjoyment-to-be-had.

That these encouragement mmms work for the most part like an assessment token is further evidenced by extract 10, in which we see an example of an mmm alongside an object-side assessment. This is taken from the same family as above but a different mealtime.

Extract 10: family #1, Sarah (meal 10)


5. (10.0) ((Mum carries on tidying up))

In this example, Sarah is visibly chewing but there are also pieces of food dropping from her mouth and on her highchair. The mmm is then not a response to an announcement of food (announcement mmm) nor immediate taste of a piece of food (receipting mmm), but rather an orientation to an ongoing eating process that Mum herself is not engaged in (cf. modeling mmm). The combined "mmm::, (.) nice" follows a pattern seen in other mmm + evaluations in that there is short gap between the non-lexical mmm and the lexical "nice." The gustatory mmm in this case becomes more loaded in terms of assessment, though is steered toward an assessment check (with questioning intonation on the "nice," line 4) rather than an assessment claim by Mum. As with other instances of the mmms, this enables the parents to attend to the potential enjoyment of the food without overriding the infants' own abilities to assess the food for themselves. The mmm therefore ambiguously orients to the food as being pleasurable without making any claims about the infant's sensory experiences. Had this been a "like it?" subject-side assessment, for instance, then this would position the parents as making assumptions about their child's taste experiences or food preferences (Edwards and Potter, 2017).

In the final example, we see the use of an encouragement mmm in a more exaggerated form. On this occasion, Daisy is being distracted by the family cat. Mum makes several attempts to draw Daisy's attention back to the food, and the mmm becomes part of this endeavor.

Extract 11: family #3, Daisy (meal 4)


Throughout this sequence, Mum has a spoon held out toward Daisy—with food on it—and Daisy has a little food left in her mouth that she is not visibly chewing. Daisy is focused instead on the antics of the cat, and keeps her gaze on the cat except for a short period (lines 4-5). The ".mpt" here represent a series of lip-smack noises that Mum uses to orient to the food, and specifically, to the eating of the food. The encouragement gustatory mmm is placed at the end of the second sequence of lip smacks (line 4) and is accompanied by a smile and an extended prosodic form of the mmm. This mmm therefore has quite a different sequential organization to the previous encouragement mmms, though the social action within which they are bound up is the same: to keep the child focused on eating the food.

# DISCUSSION

This study has provided a preliminary classification system for four different types of gustatory mmms that may be enacted by parents during infant mealtimes, as found in the data corpus from English-speaking families living in Scotland. The classification was based on multimodal features including



sequential organization, format and duration of mmms, eye gaze, and object (food) manipulation by both parents and infants. It has been argued that these gustatory mmms enact and make relevant enjoyment of eating at specific moments in the mealtime, and orient to enjoyment as an interactional and socially normative process around food. Moreover, they appear to orient to different kinds of enjoyment, whether in anticipation of the food (announcement mmms) or in relation to the sensory features of the food (receipting mmms). **Table 3** below summarizes the mmms in terms of their sequential position and key features.

Across all four types, some key findings can be summarized:


The regularity in the sequential positioning and organization within the social interaction are strong evidence that the mmms were not produced purely on the basis of, for example, olfactory, or gustatory senses of the parent (smelling or tasting of the food). Nor might the parents have been attending to the facial expressions of their infants, since the mmms occurred in the corpus at the same sequential point relative to the food in the mouth, regardless of any facial expressions of the infants. They appear to be more closely tied to the sequentiality of the interaction than to individual characteristics. The potential "third position" of the receipting mmms, for instance, was particularly regular, in which the mmm occurred after the food was first carried to, then placed within, the mouth.

In contrast to the work discussed in the introduction, this paper argues that it is important to examine enjoyment as a socially normative practice enacted within interaction, and to observe when and how it occurs during mealtimes. It becomes relevant at certain moments—when food is being introduced, when food is placed in the mouth, when there is eye contact between parent and infant, and when there might be a need to encourage an infant to eat more food. The parents are not only attending to their own enjoyment (modeling mmm), they are also non-lexically embodying the assumed or potential sensory experiences that they might expect their infant to enjoy. Enjoyment can therefore be much more than an individual concept; it can be part of the glue that holds mealtimes together. As such, it need not be considered antagonistic to notions of health, since one might argue that the health of the infant is dependent in part on them consuming sufficient food. The gustatory mmm does not in itself specify whether or not something is "healthy" nor what it is that makes it pleasurable. As a non-lexical vocalization it is semantically flexible and thus provides for an orientation to enjoyment without precluding health. It does not, as it were, rely on the health vs. pleasure dichotomy.

The paper also provides a potential bridge between cultural and psychological work on eating enjoyment, focusing as it does on the interaction between parent and infant, and on those moments in which enjoyment becomes socially available. There are other connections, too. The announcement mmms are reminiscent of food advertising, for instance, in that they orient to the to-be-consumed food item immediately before it is offered to the infant. In a similar way, advertising tempts us through images of food before it is eaten; orienting to the anticipation of a meal before the appetite is sated (Korsmeyer and Sutton, 2011). They work rather differently, then, to those mmms which occur later in the meal, since they orient to enjoyment as encompassing the expectation of taste as much as they do of the taste itself. The use of modeling and encouragement mmms to engage infants in the eating process, whether or not the parents are themselves eating, also attends to the complex interplay between the social aspects of eating and the work of feeding infants.

There are limitations to this study that should be acknowledged. This was a study that used video-recordings taken by families in Scotland as examples of naturalistic meals in family homes. The families were not asked to feed in a specific manner, and therefore there is considerable variation across the corpus in terms of the feeding context (position of parent in relation to infant, use of utensils, and so on). The study was also limited in number of families: only five took part, and the ages of the infants varied from 5 to 8 months (even then, only the approximate age in months was recorded). The feeding of infants can change in important ways during these months and subtle variations might have been missed (cf. Negayama, 1993; van Dijk et al., 2012; Toyama, 2014). No other demographic information about the families other than the age of the parents was recorded. There was variation in the number of meals recorded, and in the timing of those meals throughout the day. In short, the data set represents a snapshot of a small cohort of families in Scotland, with limited demographic information upon which to catalog the sample. While this is counterbalanced by the repeated patterns found in the use of the non-lexical mmm, it is important to situate the findings within this research context.

While the research has met the study aims of examining how and where enjoyment becomes socially relevant in infant mealtimes, there is undoubtedly more work to be done. The gustatory mmm might be culturally normative within the English language, but research is needed into the use of similar non-lexical utterances in other languages and other mealtime contexts. The different types of mmms classified in this paper would also benefit from further analysis: how they may be aligned with the progressivity of the meal, how might the modeling and encouragement mmms be further refined to distinguish between different activities as the meal progresses, and so on. The orientation to enjoyment as a cultural norm within other types of meals, with older children, or with only adults, would also be important to explore. What happens in those mealtimes which are more problematic or difficult for parents? We might then consider what happens when children are not eating at all, and what happens with the interaction during those occasions. As noted in the introduction, the cultural norm that meals should be enjoyable has not yet been matched by research to examine just how and when this enjoyment becomes an interactional practice, or what happens where this might be lacking.

#### DATA AVAILABILITY

The datasets for this manuscript are not publicly available because the data was collected before open access protocols were

#### REFERENCES


in operation and the data comprises videos of infants in their homes. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to SW at sally.wiggins.young@liu.se.

## ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the University of Strathclyde Psychology department ethics committee with written informed consent from all participants. All adult participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the University of Strathclyde Psychology department ethics committee.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author was solely responsible for the design, data transcription and management, analysis, and writing of the paper.

### FUNDING

Data collection was supported by a University of Strathclyde summer internship grant; the analysis and writing were supported by the Swedish Research Council grant number VR2016-00827, Vocal practices for coordinating human action.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the five families who so kindly recorded their mealtimes, Meghan Jones for assistance with data collection, and the financial support of the University of Strathclyde internship and the Swedish Research Council. Warm thanks also to Leelo Keevallik and the non-lexical vocalizations project members at Linköping University. The manuscript has benefitted from the reviewers' astute observations and the author is grateful for their encouragement and constructive criticism.


Coveney, J., and Bunton, R. (2003). In pursuit of pleasure: implications for health research and practice. Health 7, 161–179. doi: 10.1177/1363459303007002873


Edwards, D., and Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Wiggins. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Socialization Practices Regarding Shame in Japanese Caregiver–Child Interactions

#### Akira Takada\*

Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Affect is both an organizing force and a product of socialization practices in communities. Shame is an affective experience that is primarily rooted in socially shared normativity, and it has featured in studies of language socialization that examine how children are socialized into their socio-culturally structured universe (Duranti et al., 2012). After the publication of Benedict's (1946) seminal work, shame became associated with the ethos of East Asian cultures. Inspired by previous work, this paper focuses on the use, in socialization, of phrases that include the Japanese term hazukashii, which is commonly translated as shameful, in the context of Japanese caregiver– child interactions. We videotaped interactions between young Japanese children and their caregivers in natural settings and examined the gestures and speech around uses of hazukashii. The results indicate that phrases including hazukashii are often used when a child hesitates to perform an appropriate action or performs an act that is deemed inappropriate. The caregiver thereby provides an account that the action is understandable in the given context. Further, hazukashii is also used in teasing contexts. This is done to promote a cooperative and pleasant atmosphere. The word hazukashii is a powerful tool for the language socialization of children in Japanese speech communities.

#### Edited by:

Carolin Demuth, Aalborg University, Denmark

#### Reviewed by:

Emi Morita, National University of Singapore, Singapore Bambi B. Schieffelin, New York University, United States

#### \*Correspondence:

Akira Takada takada@jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp; akiratakad@gmail.com

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 27 January 2019 Accepted: 18 June 2019 Published: 11 July 2019

#### Citation:

Takada A (2019) Socialization Practices Regarding Shame in Japanese Caregiver–Child Interactions. Front. Psychol. 10:1545. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01545 Keywords: caregiver–child interaction, Japanese, shame, language socialization, affect

# INTRODUCTION

Affect is both an organizing force and a product of socialization practices in various communities. It merits the fullest consideration: even if an emotion is commonly observed across various speech communities, the cultural meaning of that emotion in relation to the dominant values of the speech community could differ. Moreover, when emotional terms are used to describe an action or the state of a particular person in a conversation, whether or not it is the person him- or herself stating it, the emotion is not necessarily internally experienced by that person. Thus, Averill (1980, p. 337) posited that emotions are part of the socially constructed role that a person plays. He also asserted that it was necessary to analyze emotions on a socio-cultural level rather than on a physiological level. We must consider emotional expressions used in mundane, everyday interactions to understand emotions properly as socio-cultural constructs (Demuth, 2013).

Takada Socialization Practices Regarding Shame

Shame is among the affective experiences that Ekman (1992) listed as the basic emotions.<sup>1</sup> It is primarily rooted in socially shared normativity, and it has attracted considerable attention in the study of social history and socialization in East Asian (e.g., Benedict, 1946; Doi, 1973, 1974; Clancy, 1986; Fung, 1999; Fung and Chen, 2001; Lo and Fung, 2012) and other (e.g., Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986; Fader, 2006; Reynolds, 2008; Demuth, 2013) societies. Below, I give a brief summary of important studies of socialization into and through shame in East Asian societies.<sup>2</sup>

Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) was one of the most influential discussions of Japanese society published during the immediate postwar period. Benedict was leading the Japanese team of the War Information Bureau when she was conducting the research for this book, which was based on interviews with Nikkei, or Japanese emigrants living abroad; in Benedict's case, these were Japanese who had emigrated to the United States and their descendants. While she was conducting her research, its subjects were living in wartime concentration camps. Benedict was a leading cultural anthropologist in an academic environment that adhered to the doctrine of cultural relativism. In her research, she sought a unique ethos expressed throughout Japanese culture. She wrote that the Japanese were extremely sensitive to the expectations and criticism of others (including their family members, stakeholders in their profession, and the general public) and that their social lives were strongly bound by ideas of grace and obligation. Benedict characterized Japanese culture as having a foundation in feelings of shame. Moreover, she approached the Japanese "culture of shame" through its contrast with the Western "culture of sin," which, she proposed, could be understood as being based on the feeling of sin, which is present in each of its members through the enlightenment of conscience in reference to absolute moral standards. Many Japanese, including researchers, marveled that Benedict, who never visited Japan, was able to analyze Japan's culture and the spiritual life of its people in such a beautiful writing style.<sup>3</sup>

The influence of Benedict's works, including The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, is clear in much scholarly work and general discussion on Japan, even within the country itself. A notable example of this is the work of the Freudian psychiatrist and theorist of Japanese culture Takeo Doi. In his book The Anatomy of Dependence (1973), which was a bestseller and judged a masterpiece, Doi criticized Benedict's work, alleging that she underestimated the culture of shame and that the relation between the culture of shame and the culture of sin was underdiscussed. However, he acknowledged that she was right in characterizing Japanese culture as being based on the feeling of shame. He then argued that shame came from being exposed to the public in such a way that one's amae was not satisfied. Amae was, according to Doi, the characteristic of a person who is in good favor with, and is able to depend on, those around him or her (Doi, 1973); briefly, this characteristic indicates a protected relationship (Doi, 1974, p. 18). Doi (1973, 1974) also argued that amae is desire rooted in the passive affection for the mother, exhibited in early childhood. The Japanese are thus socialized from the first into amae as a nucleus of acknowledgment by others and, as they grow, they try to build and maintain relationships with others in such a way as to maintain amae. Although amae is similar to the English concept of dependence, it has developed in a culturally distinctive way. The structure of Japanese society is based on this and related values. The Japanese language itself reflects this in that it is often easier to express one's opinions or feelings indirectly and euphemistically (among other examples, the semantic features of such a term as amae and the syntactic feature that allows the predicate or the particle of negation to be at the end of the utterance, along with the feature that allows for the ellipsis of various elements of the sentence<sup>4</sup> ). Further, among the Japanese themselves, the double standard between honne and tatemae, or internal and external attitudes, are generally acknowledged and accepted. Unlike Americans, who try to make the two coincide, Japanese often avoid expressing their real intentions in public to support harmony within the group (Doi, 1973, 1974).

Doi's response to Benedict afforded insight into how the feeling of shame is derived in the psychodynamic process of Japanese everyday life. However, empirical examination was still required to validate the argument. Therefore, it prompted significant discussion among students of Japanese culture and communication. Clancy (1986) did pioneering work

<sup>1</sup>Ekman (1992) listed anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, interest, awe, contempt, embarrassment, enjoyment, excitement, guilt, and shame as candidates for the basic emotions. These were chosen for the basic emotions because they used distinctive and universal signals, such as facial expressions; other primates exhibited similar emotions. These emotions had distinct physiological functions, the event preceding the emotion showed distinct and universal features, they caused consistent emotional responses, they occurred quickly and they did not last long, they were assessed automatically and they occurred spontaneously.

<sup>2</sup>For more comprehensive reviews of this topic, see Sakuta (1967) and Minami (1994).

<sup>3</sup> In The Japanese Journal of Ethnology (Minzokugaku Kenkyu), a representative academic publication on Japanese ethnology and cultural anthropology, published reviews of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1950, not long after the war. Leading Japanese intellectuals such as Takeyoshi Kawashima (an expert in the sociology of the law), Hiroshi Minami (social psychology), Kizaemon Ariga (rural sociology), Tetsuro Watsuji (philosophy), and Kunio Yanagita (folklore studies) contributed articles to the issue. Although the judgments of Kawashima, Minami, Ariga, and Yanagita were positive overall, they also criticized the work. In brief: they asserted that the Japanese were over-generalized in Benedict's work; differences owing to social class, geography, occupation, and other factors were overlooked (Ariga, 1950; Kawashima, 1950); the author considered Japanese culture to be a fixed entity; insufficient analysis of the internal dynamics of the culture had been done (Minami, 1950); it would be impossible to improve one's understanding by contrasting the culture of sin against the culture of shame within one horizon (Yanagita, 1950); and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword improperly

produced general conclusions from error-ridden or misunderstood data (Watsuji, 1950). All of these criticisms more or less pointed to the limitations of Benedict's argument and were repeated afterward by others.

<sup>4</sup>Along the lines of Doi's (1973, 1974) argument, Takada (2013) demonstrated that the use of particular grammatical items, such as modal markers, in Japanese conversation make it possible to modulate the intensity of action. These items usually come at the end of a sentence and allow the speaker to coordinate his or her actions with a hearer's behavior, while progressively monitoring the latter. Additionally, Takada and Kawashima (in press) argued that the dropping of the subject, which often occurs in Japanese conversation, has the effect of blurring the distinctions of footing (Goffman, 1981) among the participants of the interaction. These syntactic features contribute significantly to ambiguate differences in opinion between speaker and hearer, thereby enhancing their empathetic cooperation, one of the important features of amae.

in this domain, analyzing the interactions between 2-year-old Japanese children and their mothers to examine their language socialization. She developed a model of how Japanese children are socialized into the distinct Japanese communication style. She noted Doi's idea of amae, and her discussion fundamentally supports its reality as a factor in a Japanese upbringing. In Clancy (1986), interaction between Japanese mothers and children was found to strengthen and reflect cultural beliefs. Mothers often elicit empathy from their children by drawing their attention to the feelings of others to prompt them to perform desired actions. The feelings highlighted in this context can include such emotions as scary, sad, poor, and cute. Mothers, by doing this, draw attention to their own feelings as well as those of a third party, including even unborn children and inanimate objects as having feelings like others (Takada, 2013; Takada and Kawashima, 2016). Clancy (1986) argued that, with such strategies, mothers train their children's empathy and compassion. As they bring their children into closer consideration of the feelings of others, they are also bringing the pressure of conformity to bear. Thus, empathy and conformity are two sides of the same coin (Clancy, 1986, p. 235). To train her child's empathy, the mother plants the fear of being laughed at by others. For example, if a child who has behaved inappropriately encounters another person's disapproval, he or she is expected to feel ashamed. The mother may not specify a grammatical subject or a full sentence on this occasion but may simply say hazukashii (shameful or ashamed). With this word, the mother communicates her feeling that the child is hazukashii and that the child should feel the same way.

It is not only Japanese culture that is considered to be founded on the feeling of shame. It is also associated with the ethos of other East Asian cultures. According to Lo and Fung (2012), in Taiwan and South Korea, feelings of shame begin in childhood and continue in various forms over the course of life. Additionally, shame is an essential element in morality. Confucianism, which forms part of the common ideological background for Taiwan and Korea in public and educational settings, teaches that human beings can live humbly if they experience shame. In such cultures, children are taught to feel shame from a young age. To shame a young child is to express "a form of love, discipline, and moral teaching that aims to protect the child from future external sanctions" (Lo and Fung, 2012, p. 173). Lo and Fung (2012) analyzed several examples of language socialization regarding shame, such as cases where utterances that included an emotional shame-related term were directed toward children, cases in which gestures customarily associated with shame were used, and cases in which negative assessments that were associated with shame were made. In their analysis, these examples appeared in rebukes, teasing, and expressions of love and intimacy. By employing shame-based communications, a caregiver can guide a child "to reflect upon her own deeds and to develop a sense of right and wrong" (Lo and Fung, 2012, p. 186).

As exemplified in Clancy (1986) and Lo and Fung (2012), studies of language socialization have examined everyday interactions in which children are socialized into a socioculturally structured universe (Duranti et al., 2012). These studies posit everyday interactions represented in utterance exchanges as the medium of socialization as well as the purpose of socialization across various speech communities. In these works, emotions are regarded as the organizing motive for socialization practices and as the products of such practices. Thus, "work on shaming in the language socialization tradition has documented the verbal routines through which it is enacted, its cultural salience and local meanings, and the ways that young children learn the social and moral norms of a community through shaming" (Lo and Fung, 2012, p. 169).

The present study follows the above research. In particular, it focuses on Japanese caregivers' use of phrases that include the term hazukashii, which can be translated as shameful, ashamed, shy, or embarrassed, in accounts of children's behavior or in teasing children for their behavior. This usage has not been examined to its full extent in previous studies of Japanese socialization. Thus, the term hazukashii is considered here with regard to how it emerges within socially situated caregiver– child interactions (CCI) and functions as an organizing force in socialization. This study grounds the existing discussion of the culture of shame and may prompt deeper anthropological study of emotion.

# MATERIALS AND METHODS

## The Data Set

The data used in this study were collected as part of the longitudinal research project "Cultural Formation of Responsibility in Caregiver–Child Interaction," which focuses on developmental transitions wherein children's innate behavioral preferences are shaped into coordinated patterns of interaction to meet the expectations of both caregiver and child (Takada et al., 2016). The author directed this project from 2007 to 2012 and supported follow-up projects<sup>5</sup> . The data were collected in the Kansai region of Japan.

Commencing in 2007, the research team began to visit 17 middle-class families with children aged 0–5 years with the aim of collecting data. The families were chosen from among those who expressed interest in the Kyoto University Child Development Research Group<sup>6</sup> . All families used the Kansai dialect for daily communication. A researcher and a videographer visited each family at home for approximately 2 h per month to record the interactions between the child(ren) and caregiver(s) in their natural settings in that family. Most families consisted of caregivers and more than one child, as one of the project's objectives was to elucidate how older siblings developed a sense of responsibility. Some mothers who participated in this study were pregnant at the time the data were collected. This is relevant to the analysis because an unborn child may be the subject of conversation and a participant in an interaction. In total, approximately 410 h of video were recorded, and all basic verbal and non-verbal behaviors were transcribed to yield the data set. Although there

<sup>5</sup>http://www.cci.jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/

<sup>6</sup>http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~sitakura/infant\_scientist.html

was no intention of creating a balanced sampling, the data set nevertheless reflect the everyday life of ordinary Japanese families with young children.

#### The Collection of Hazukashii

fpsyg-10-01545 July 10, 2019 Time: 17:16 # 4

Using the search system<sup>7</sup> created for the project, I extracted parts of transcripts that contain the term hazukashii. Then, I examined the extracted sections and made a collection of 337 phrases that included hazukashii (see **Table 1** for details). Then, I checked the flow of interaction within the transcripts. Following this, I chose several interesting scenes and made more detailed transcripts of them, using the film recordings. Some scenes featured more than one phrase including hazukashii.

This paper reports on the preliminary analysis of that collection and uses examples from three families, referred to by the initials TM, KT, and SA in the excerpt titles. In the excerpts transcribed below, each line includes the original Japanese utterance<sup>8</sup> , word glosses<sup>9</sup> , and an English translation. Proper names are given as pseudonyms in the form of initials or are modified for the sake of anonymity.

## Interaction Analysis

Interaction analysis was used to examine gestures and speech in these excerpts, using analytical concepts derived from conversation analysis (Schegloff, 2007; Sidnell and Stivers, 2013) and language socialization studies (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986; Duranti et al., 2012). Interaction analysis is an empirical method of determining why a given action is performed at a specific place and time, done by deconstructing the sequential organization of the interaction (i.e., by clarifying the mutual relevance of adjacent actions: Schegloff, 2007; Nishizaka, 2008). This approach explains TABLE 1 | Occurrence of phrases including hazukashii by family.


not only how certain actions are taken within a particular sociocultural context but also how those actions alter the context. This method is thus a variant of the integrative approach to the study of human sociality, which combines the analysis of situated social interaction with ethnographic procedures (Demuth and Fatigante, 2012).

## RESULTS

In Japanese CCI, both caregivers and children use phrases including the term hazukashii. Such phrases can be used to describe the child's action or state, those of the caregiver, or of other figures that appear in the interaction in whatever form. In our data set, caregivers frequently uttered phrases to young children that included hazukashii, even at a very early age. **Table 1** shows the distribution of the use of such phrases by family. It indicates that phrases including hazukashii were broadly observed in all families, although the actual rate of occurrence varied among families (averaging 0.8 times per hour).

Phrases including hazukashii were used more frequently by caregivers than by children. They were often used in accounting children's hesitation to perform an appropriate action (i.e., being shy or embarrassed).

#### Hazukashii as Accounting

The excerpt below is drawn from interactions involving the male infant T, who was 12 months old, and his parents and older sister, N. During the excerpt, T is being held on his father's (F) lap. Both are facing toward a large, set dining table. N sits on the chair to the right of F and T, and the

<sup>7</sup> I note here the generous work of Dr. Yoshihiko Asao (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology) in building the search system.

<sup>8</sup> In the excerpts, utterances are transcribed according to a modified version of the conventions developed in conversation analysis research (for details, see Schegloff, 2007; Sidnell and Stivers, 2013). Information that is significant for the utterance is indicated in double parentheses: (()). Equals signs (=) indicate run-on utterances or an utterance that has been interrupted by someone else. Pause length is marked in parentheses, in tenths of a second [e.g., (0.6)]. A dot in parentheses (.) indicates a tiny gap, probably no more than one-tenth of a second. Overlap of utterances is marked by square brackets: []. Two degree signs (◦ ◦) enclose remarks that were markedly softer in tone than the discussion surrounding it. Two number signs (# #) enclose indicates a rasping or 'creaky' voice quality. An up arrow (↑) marks an increase in the pitch of the voice. Talk between "more-than" and "lessthan" symbols has been compressed (> <) or slowed down (< >). A dash after a word or part of a word indicates a cutoff or self-interruption. Period indicates a full stop (pronounced in a falling tone), while comma indicates more is expected (pronounced in a slight falling tone). Colons (:) indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound and the length of the row of colons indicates the length of the prolongation. A row of h's prefixed by a dot indicates an inbreath, without a dot an outbreath. The length of the row of h's indicates the length of the inor outbreath. Capitals indicate especially loud sounds relative to the surrounding talk. Single parentheses indicate that an utterance was unintelligible or made by an unidentifiable source.

<sup>9</sup> Interlinear gloss abbreviations are indicated as follows: ACC, accusative; ASP, aspect marker; CAU, causative suffix; COND, conditional form; COP, copula; CP, conjunctive particle; DAT, dative; DIM, diminutive marker; HON, honorific marker; IJ, interjection; LK, linker; NAME, proper name; NEG, negative; NOM, nominative; PER, perfect; PP, pragmatic particle; PST, past; Q, question marker; QT, quotative particle; SSW, sound-symbolic word; TE, conjunctive (-te form); VOL, volitional suffix.

mother (M) is sitting in a chair to the right of N (**Figure 1**). On the other side of the dining table, the researcher (R) is sitting (she does not appear in the video). Excerpt 1 begins when the mother addresses T by his name, and T replies with a vocalization and a smile.<sup>10</sup> In the transcription of the excerpt, an arrow (→) indicates an utterance that contains hazukashii.

#### **Excerpt 1 Pachi pachi (TM\_K080628\_1)**

**T (1:0), N (3:1), M (mother), F (father), R (researcher)**

	- IJ

**[hu::m ((T stops smiling and turns his eyes away from M.))**

	- 11 R: hh[h **hh[h**
	- 12 F: [hh **[hh**

#### 13 M: nantonaku itteru koto wa tsutawatteru kanji ga(0.2) somehow saying thing TOP conveying feeling NOM **it seems that somehow he gets what I say(0.2)**

In line 1, M prompts T to clap his hands by speaking a phrase that combines the onomatopoeia pachi pachi pachi and the particle wa (delivered in a rising tone, indicating a question form), which designates topicalization (**Figure 1**). Prompting is a subcategory of directives (Takada, 2013; Takada and Endo, 2015), which are defined utterances "intended to get the listener to do something" (Goodwin, 2006, p. 107). A similar onomatopoeia is used in lines 3, 5, and 7, and all of these utterances are combined with clapping. In addition, along with M's utterance in line 1, F gives an utterance that sounds like an imitation of the preceding vocalization of T (line 2). Seeing M's prompting action, T stops smiling and turns his eyes away from M.

Almost simultaneously, M prompts T to clap (lines 3 and 5). At this point, R makes an interjection that is similar to F's interjection in line 2 (line 4). However, T does not react to these actions. M then makes a request in the form of negation (line 6) and then makes prompts again (line 7). T then redirects his gaze toward M as if reacting to M's onomatopoeia and clapping. N makes a request in the form of a negation "deki hin?" ["((you)) can't ((do it))?"], which is similar to the previous utterance by M, and claps (line 8). This request falls into the subcategory of directive (Takada, 2013; Takada and Endo, 2015). T looks at M and N again, smiles faintly, and begins to clap his hands in a half-hearted manner, but he quickly stops. Then, M prompts in the form of a request (line 9).

<sup>10</sup>Following the convention of interaction analysis, I describe the interactions in the transcriptions in the present tense to focus on the ongoing nature of the construction of social reality.

In the above interactions, M and N repeatedly issue modified directives, which creates a rhythm in their interaction, as they monitor T's behavior. They thereby try to make T clap his hands happily. However, T does not react appropriately to these directives.

Then F, who is holding T on his lap, asks him "((are you)) hazukashii¿" (line 10). Simultaneously with this utterance, T turns his eyes away from M and N and looks ahead, and looks ahead to where the researcher is sitting. F then gently strokes T's head and giggles (**Figure 2**). The utterance in line 10 provides an account, which attributes the lack of sufficient response by T to the preceding directives to T's emotional state of hazukashii. This also works as an assertion that the lack of response does not imply inability (e.g., that he is too young to understand the utterances) or any intention to resist the directives (e.g., that he does not want to clap his hands). Here, hazukashii means something like being embarrassed or shy, though it should be noted that the English word shy can be an attitude or a trait, while the term hazukashii here indicates a transitory emotional state derived from particular circumstances. Thus, the equivalent expression would be to be embarrassed. This account appears to be accepted by R and M. Immediately R laughs, showing agreement with F (line 11). F laughs together with R (line 12). Finally, M comments that T has understood the preceding directives (line 13).

The following excerpt involves the same family as in Excerpt 1, and the phrase including hazukashii is used to account for the behavior of the child. About 2 months have passed since the recording of Excerpt 1. The mother (M) is standing inside the kitchen, with N standing on a chair across the bar counter. In front of N, there is a large dining table, as in Excerpt 1. The father (F) sits opposite the mother, as seen by N (however, he is not on screen). Before this excerpt begins, N and his parents are speaking of whether cicadas are frightening or cute. The excerpt begins as M gives an iced coffee to C, the camera operator filming the video.

FIGURE 2 | F gently strokes T's head and giggles (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

**Excerpt 2 Please give it (TM\_K080907\_2)**

#### **N (3:3), M (mother), F (father), C (camera operator)**


→ 7 M: [hazukashii n ka shy LK Q **[((are you)) hazukashii**


→ 11 M: [hazukashii na shy PP **[((you are)) hazukashii**

**(9.0)**

12 F: erai genki ga= greatly cheer NOM **((she)) fairly ((lost her)) cheer=**

$$\begin{array}{rcl} \text{13 M: = ee};\\ \text{II} &\\ = \text{what?} \end{array}$$

14 F: =ima made no genki ga dokka i tta now until LK cheer NOM somewhere go PST **=her cheer ((that she had)) just now went somewhere**


fpsyg-10-01545 July 10, 2019 Time: 17:16 # 7

N leans her body on the bar while looking at the iced coffee glass. M asks N to pass the glass to the camera operator (line 1; **Figure 3**). The phrase douzo (please) is frequently used when Japanese caregivers prompt children to do something. Here, M prompts N to perform a chore, namely, bringing a glass of iced coffee to the guest. Following this, N pulls her body slightly upright. Watching this, M makes prompts again, using the utterance oniisan ni douzo (tte) [(saying) "douzo" to him] (line 2). In this second prompting, the proper name Mr. C is replaced by oniisan, a title derived from the kin term for elder brother. The latter is a friendlier expression to use in referring to N. Furthermore, the quotation marker tte emphasizes that the utterance is a prompting.

Then, N looks at M and bangs on the table (in the video, the sound is clearly heard) to indicate her resistance to the directive. She then brings a mug of iced tea, which is set next to the glass, to her mouth. Immediately M acknowledges this action, saying, "it's Naho's" (line 3). Looking back, N continues to drink tea. The mother interjects "nhu" (line 4) to draw N's attention. Then, N looks at M again while putting the mug to her mouth and puts the mug back onto the counter.

Watching this, M reiterates her directive (line 5). This utterance takes the form of a request, which is a sub-category

FIGURE 3 | M asks N to pass the glass to the camera operator (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

of a directive and a stronger expression than prompting (Takada, 2013; Takada and Endo, 2015). The expression motte ikeru¿ (can you bring it to him¿) conveys both whether N has the ability to carry out the action and whether she has the intention of performing the action. Furthermore, by using the name Naho, she makes it clearer that N is the addressee of the directive. Both communications tend to increase the pressure of the directive.

However, N shows no sign that she intends to pick up the glass. The lack of N's appropriate response (i.e., second pair part) to the mother's directives (i.e., first pair part) indicates that the adjacency pair is incomplete and, thus, renders the child's non-compliance visible. Seeing this, F gives an account for N's series of actions, saying, "iya, hazukashii ka na¿" [um, ((you are)) hazukashii, aren't you¿], which can be understood to mean, "you are embarrassed, aren't you?" (line 6). The interjection iya (um) at the beginning of this utterance indicates that he does not take the lack of N's appropriate response to the mother's directives as non-compliance. Moreover, it projects that another account for N's series of actions will follow. Then, F asserts that N has not given the iced coffee to C because she is hazukashii. This term is used here in the same meaning as in Excerpt 1, namely, being shy or embarrassed. That is, F is attributing the reason for N's failure to act properly to a temporary emotion caused by the situation at the moment. The interjection is provided as a more understandable interpretation that interprets N's behavior as a lack of reaction rather than non-compliance. Furthermore, kana appears in this utterance, a final particle that indicates a question or confirmation. Thus, judgment on the pros and cons of the account is directly entrusted to N and indirectly to other hearers. Partially overlapping with this utterance, M repeats F's comment (line 7). This is done with a smile and in a whispering voice as M reaches for the glass containing iced coffee. This acknowledges the account of the preceding father's utterance.

Then, M repeats the request twice more (line 8) and places the glass slightly closer to N. The first of these iterations of the request includes the negative question form motte ike nai¿ (can't you bring it to him¿), which is intended to elicit N's voluntary action. In addition, F laughs at the same time as this is said (line 9). While looking at M, however, N picks up the mug containing tea without showing any sign of reaching for the glass of iced coffee. F acknowledges this, saying "((you)) would be hazukashii" (line 10). Note that yarou, which marks a tag question, is used here. This word strengthens the father's epistemic stance (Heritage, 2012), confirming the correctness of the account with a greater degree of certainty than the utterance in line 6. Overlapping with this, M repeats F's utterance one more time (line 11). Here, the final particle na, which indicates confirmation, follows immediately after the term hazukashii. This is designed to confirm that the account is correct. N does not reply, however, but continues to drink tea while watching M.

Then, F says that N's energy has gone somewhere (lines 12, 14, 16). M asks for a repair (Kitzinger, 2013) at lines 13 and 15, which may indicate that the prior utterances (lines 12, 14) are difficult to hear. Finally, she exhibits agreement, saying, "that's true," with laughter (line 17).

#### Hazukashii as Teasing

fpsyg-10-01545 July 10, 2019 Time: 17:16 # 8

In our dataset, the term hazukashii also frequently occurred in the context of teasing a child or saying that certain action(s) carried out by the child are inappropriate in relation to social norms (i.e., shameful or something to be embarrassed/ashamed about).

In the next example, the girl A, 2 years and 9 months old, is watching a video, taken while A was still an infant, with her mother (M) in her last month of pregnancy (on the TV screen, children, including baby A, and a woman, who appears to be the nursery teacher, are seen). M cautions A to take a step back. A turns to M, rising up on her knees, and tries to move back as instructed. The excerpt begins from there.

#### **Excerpt 3 It's a baby (KT\_A080310\_2)**


1 A: a::: IJ **a:::** 2 M: h akachan ya baby PP **h it's a baby**

3 A: a:[: a a a IJ IJ IJ IJ **a:[: a a a**


10 A: aa, iya ya. IJ no PP **oh, no.**

11 M: are akachan ja nai. hh ima(h) demo(h) IJ baby PP NEG now but **oh, it's not a baby. hh but just now(h)**

> akachan(h) natta(h) yaro. baby became FP **you behaved(h) like(h) a baby**

	- 13 M: akachan [(nattan) baby become-PST-Q **((you)) (behaved) as a ba[by**
	- 14 A: [aa:: IJ **[aa::**
	- 15 A: a aha aha aha utta. IJ IJ IJ IJ hit-PST **a aha aha aha ((I)) hit it.**
	- 16 M: hora hora akachan ni. IJ IJ baby DAT **hey, hey, ((you behaved like)) a baby.**
	- 17 M: akachan natta? baby become-PST **((did you)) behave as a baby?**

A loses her balance and her hands strike the floor. A immediately begins to pretend to cry like a baby (line 1; **Figure 4**). M immediately breathes in and remarks "it's a baby" (line 2), acknowledging the change in the footing (Goffman, 1981) of A's utterances. The mother says that A was inspired by baby A on the screen to pretend to be a baby. Perhaps this (A pretending to be a baby) is also related to the fact that M is

FIGURE 4 | A begins to pretend to cry like a baby (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

in the last month of her pregnancy and A is conscious of the baby who will soon be born. Then, A performs exaggerated mock crying (line 3). Overlapping with this, the mother repeats, "it's a baby" (line 4). As similar utterance exchanges are reiterated in lines 5 and 6, A goes to M, and they hug each other (**Figure 5**). M holds A gently. In these interactions, there is a playful atmosphere between them.

Addressing A, who continues to pretend to cry, M formulates the open question, "what's the baby going to do?" twice (lines 7–9). At the same time, M holds A under her arm as if she will feed her like a baby. These open questions act as a prompt for A to upgrade the pretense play of being a baby by adopting a posture in which A is held (i.e., performing the role of being breastfed). The situation is embarrassing for A because, first, open questions, which require selecting the words included in an answer from various candidates, are generally difficult for young children, who are not yet adept at using language (Takada and Kawashima, 2016). Additionally, M's utterances here are provocative as they imply that A is being tested as to whether she can appropriately upgrade the pretense play of being a baby. A then changes the footing of her utterance again, saying, "oh, no," and releases herself from M's embrace (line 10; **Figure 6**). This utterance and behavior indicate that A rejects the preceding open question.

M notices this and checks her understanding that A has behaved like a baby (line 11). M then offers the following comment, while laughing: "((you should feel)) ha(h)zu(h)ka(h)shii(h)" (shameful or ashamed).<sup>11</sup> This utterance

<sup>11</sup>It is possible to interpret the meaning of this part of the utterance as either "((you should feel)) ashamed" (because she is no longer a baby) or "((mother is feeling)) embarrassed" (because of her child's babyish behavior in this videorecorded situation). I assume that the former is accurate, because it does not mark a change in the sentence subject either literally (manifesting the sentence subject) or prosodically (e.g., modifying the tone of the voice) from the preceding part of the utterance ["wow(h), ((you)) behaved(h) like(h) a(h) baby(h)"]. Note that it is not obligatory in Japanese to mark the semantic subject and/or actor of a verb when it may be inferred from the semantic or pragmatic context (e.g., Kobayashi, 2005, 2006). Additionally, the fact that both interpretations are plausible shows that the characteristics of amae are being socialized here (i.e., the mother's feeling can coincide with what the girl should be feeling, thus rendering the emotion co-dependent).

FIGURE 5 | A and M hug each other (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

FIGURE 6 | A releases herself from M's embrace (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

is designed as teasing A by laughingly pointing out the gap between the role played by A and A's usual behaviors.

While M is saying this, A gives M a hug. The mother teases A, saying, "wow(h), ((you)) behaved(h) like(h) a(h) baby(h)," while laughing, and then she makes the following assessment (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987) of A's action in line 12: "((You are)) ha(h)zu(h)ka(h)shii(h)." Simultaneously, M pats A on the back repeatedly. Hazukashii is here used in a meaning that is closer to "shameful" or "ashamed," although it is used in a playful context. In other words, the mother is teasing A, saying that A, who has acted younger than her actual age, should feel ashamed, and M also feels this to be shameful. This utterance exchanges dissolve the friction in the interaction. The mother repeats the question, "((you behaved)) as a ba[by," confirming her feeling in line 13. A then begins her mock crying again (line 14). However, this mock crying gradually shifts to an ordinary, embarrassed vocalization, and then A explains why she was crying (because she hit her leg on the ground) (line 15). In response, the mother confirms that A has acted like a baby (lines 16 and 17), but these utterances are made in a gentle and ordinary tone of voice; it appears that the teasing atmosphere of the preceding utterance is now gone.

Let us examine another example of teasing. Below, the woman M, her son Y, 4 years and 1 month old, and her daughter B, 8 months old, are having lunch. M is sitting in front of Y at a table. B sits on M's left oblique front. Before the excerpt begins, Y is eating by himself. Then he gradually loses his appetite. Seeing this, M begins to serve him his food directly, using her chopsticks, as she also has been doing for B. The excerpt begins there.

#### **Excerpt 4 Girls will laugh at you (SA\_Y090612\_2)**

#### **B (0:9), Y (4:1), M (mother)**

	- 4 M: hora hora hora tobideten de, akan na::hh IJ IJ IJ runing over PP not good PP **hey hey hey ((something)) is running over, it's not goo:d hh ((M wipes Y's nose by a tissue.))**
	- **((5 lines are omitted))**

10 M: hai.

IJ **here you are. ((M feeds a piece of meal to Y.))**

11 Y: de.

IJ

#### **and**

→12 M: hazukashii, youchien demo kouyatte ( ) tabe shameful kindergarten also like this eat **it's hazukashii. what will you do**

> sashi te moratteru toko sirare tara dou suru:? CAU TE give TE be place be found COND how do **kindergarten friends see you being fed like this? (2.4)**


15 M: na. IJ **hey**

16 M: Kiko chan toha: Yuki chan toka: Hana chan toka, name DIM and name DIM and name DIM and **little Kiko, little Yuki, little Hana**,

> Kano chan ni: Yasu kun tte mada tabesasete name DIM DAT name DIM TE still eat CAU TE **and little Kano, may say "Yasu is still fed**

moratten no: tte give PP QT **((by his mother))"**

17 M: dou suru:? how do **what do you do:?**

	- 20 M: onnanoko ni waraware chau wa yo. girl DAT be laughed PER PP PP **girls will laugh at you.**
	- 21 Y: **((Y weaves his hands on his head.))**
	- 22 Y: (u:tsusu) (ujanshan) ( ) ( ) **((Y looks at B, and then points to B by the pointing finger of his right hand.))**
	- 23 Y: shabo:n natteru SSW become **it's like shabo:n ((Y raises the pointing finger, and then shakes it.))**
	- 24 M: shabon? SSW **shabon? ((M looks at Y's face.))**
	- 25 Y: kondo. next time **next time.**
	- 26 M: (kero). **( ). ((M picks up the chopsticks.))**
	- 27 M: shobon ka¿ SSW Q **you mean shobon**¿
	- 28 Y: un. IJ **yeah. (1.4)**
	- 29 M: gochi sho: sama deshi ta. nice meal HON POL PST **thank you for the meal. ((M puts her palms together while having meal in her mouth.))**

#### 30 Y: **((Y puts his palms together))**

Seeing the crumbs around Y's mouth, M stretches out her right hand, holding a tissue, saying "wipe there by this" (line 1). Y frowns and moves his body backward, saying "au::" (line 2).

She then says "kitanai de. hazukashii yo, sore" ("it's untidy. it's hazukashii") (line 3). Hazukashii, which here means shameful, is used to call Y's attention to his poor eating manners and motivates him to eat in a more decorous way. M uses a normal tone of voice, and there is little nuance of condemnation. Y moves his body as if to dodge the offer of the tissue, but then he brings his face close to M's hand, and M begins to wipe his face. While wiping, she says, "hey hey hey ((something)) is running over, it's not goo:d hh," and smiles (line 4).

Then, Y lists something he remembers, while repeatedly placing the index finger of his left hand on the palm of his right hand (these utterances are omitted in the transcript). Then, M feeds Y a piece of food, saying, "here you are" (line 11), so as to motivate Y to eat in a tidy manner. Y immediately brings his face close to M's hand and bites the piece of food (line 12; **Figure 7**). Subsequently, the interaction shifts into a more playful mood. While watching Y being fed, M says "hazukashii, youchien demo kouyatte () tabe sashi te moratteru toko sirare tara dou suru:?" (it's hazukashii. what will you do if your kindergarten friends see you being fed like this?) (line 12). Here, M assesses Y's behavior (i.e., that M is serving him with her chopsticks, although Y is already 4 years old) as hazukashii. Here, hazukashii can be translated as shameful (because the behaviors are overly childish). M highlights this meaning by calling on him to imagine how his kindergarten friends would find those behaviors. However, M is smiling during the latter part of this utterance. Thus, it is evident that M is teasing Y for his behavior. After making inquiries twice (lines 13 and 15), M pronounces the names of four of Y's friends. She then changes the footing of her utterance, giving their words in reported speech, "Yasu kun tte mada tabesasete moratten no: tte" (say, "Yasu is still fed ((by his mother))" (line 16). She then reiterates her inquiry (line 17). That is, M continues to tease.

Here, Y avoids making a clear response, waving his hands and feet with food in his mouth. As in Excerpt 3, it appears that open questions are difficult to answer for young children who are not adept with language. In line 18, Y shakes his head four times to the right and left, while slightly smiling (**Figure 8**). These head movements may indicate a denial or rejection of M's preceding utterances. However, Y does this in a rhythmic and exaggerated manner. Thus, it resembles a choreographed dance rather than a simple denial or refusal. Additionally, Y makes these motions with a smile. Overall, he demonstrates that he understands M's utterances as teasing.

It seems that Y's reaction is insufficient for M. In line 19, she upgrades the teasing. That is, M emphasizes the difference between Y and his friends, saying, "minna hitori de tabete han noni," (all of your friends are eating by themselves though). Furthermore, she assesses Y's behavior again as hazukashii. After that, however, following a silence of 2.4 s, during which Y does not sufficiently respond to this utterance, M again further upgrades the teasing, saying, "onnanoko ni waraware chau wa yo," (girls will laugh at you) (line 20). This utterance combines a gender categorization with the previous norm of psychological/behavioral maturity and, thereby, strengthens the impact of hazukashii. That is to say, in addition to its being considered hazukashii for 4-year-old Y to be fed by his mother, it is doubly hazukashii for the boy Y if that behavior were to be known by the girls in his kindergarten class. In other words, the fact of Y's "being fed" is assessed in terms of the following norms: that a 4-year-old child should be able to eat a meal properly by himself/herself and that boys should not be laughed at by girls. Additionally, a more direct negative assessment is made with reference to the specific action of girls' laughter or ridicule. Both of these emphasize the inappropriateness of Y's previous behavior through teasing.

Listening to this, Y waves his hands above his head and makes non-verbal interjections (line 22; **Figure 9**). This display denotes resistance to M's utterance. He then points to B with the index finger of his right hand (line 23) and says, "it's like shabo:n," while raising his index finger and shaking it (line 24). He thereby avoids reacting to M directly, that is to say, mitigating the face-threatening situation (Goffman, 1981; Brown and Levinson, 1987) and, instead, expressing his reaction to his younger sister, who is still an infant. Then, M initiates a repair for the unintelligible part of Y's prior utterance (i.e., shabo:n) (line 24). After three lines, M proposes a candidate answer for the repair, saying, "shobon ka¿ (you mean shobon¿)" (line 27). Shobon is a customary expression that indicates a state of

FIGURE 7 | Y brings his face close to M's hand and eats the piece of food (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

FIGURE 8 | Y shakes his head, while slightly smiling (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

FIGURE 9 | Y waves his hands above his head (written informed consent was obtained from the depicted adults and parents of depicted children for the publication of these images).

discouragement. Y acknowledges this (line 28). Then, M closes the dining activity with a customary utterance and gesture (line 29). Y replies with the same customary gesture (line 30).

# DISCUSSION

The term hazukashii is used in Excerpt 1 during the latter part of the activity, where T is being prompted to perform the socially desirable act of clapping his hands in front of the researcher, present at the time of filming. The term hazukashii in Excerpt 2 is introduced in the latter part of a sequence of repeated directives to pass a drink to the camera operator. These interactions both involve a person who is not usually included among the family members and does not know them well, and a child is being asked to act in a certain way toward that person. Thus, the outsider present at the time of filming is treated as the addressee or hearer (Goffman, 1981) of the word.

In Excerpt 1, a caregiver uses a phrase containing the term hazukashii to describe the fact that the child does not perform appropriate actions in relation to given social norms. In this way, he presents a candidate account that is due to embarrassment caused by the immediate situation. In Excerpt 2, the phrase in which the father employs the term hazukashii describes an omission to act by a child, which is deemed inappropriate. Here again, the father presents a candidate account that the failure is due to embarrassment (line 6). Subsequently, the mother acknowledges this assessment (line 7). Then, in response to the fact that the behavior of the child does not improve, the father presents the account once more, again including hazukashii (line 10), and the mother partially repeats it, thereby confirming the account (line 11). In all of these cases, the term hazukashii is used with a meaning close to that of being shy or embarrassed.

Whether the child hesitates to conduct an appropriate action or performs an act that can be deemed inappropriate, the term hazukashii in these excerpts indicates the account for the action or omission in relation to the given context and functions to make the action or omission understandable. In this way, an actor whose action is deemed hazukashii is given the opportunity to justify, modify, or repeat preceding actions in a more appropriate manner as a next action. This provides the child with early opportunities that enhance amae, that is, an actor presumes upon the recipient's willingness to cooperate, empathize, and intuit what he/she has in mind (Doi, 1974). That is to say, the cooperative and empathetic attitude of the caregiver becomes visible to the child through the demonstration of understanding in relation to his/her inappropriate or inadequate actions. Therefore, phrases including the term hazukashii serve as a useful tool for the language socialization of children in the talk-in-interaction process among Japanese speakers.

In Excerpt 3, a phrase containing hazukashii was employed to note the gap between what A does, inspired by the given context in the video, and A's ordinary behavior (line 12). A is in a somewhat distant context from the ordinary routine of family communication. It is difficult for her to behave properly in this context. In this case, the mother teased A by pointing to her being overly childish. In a teasing context, hazukashii is used with a meaning that is close to shameful, which is an assessment.

In Excerpt 4, the mother uses the term hazukashii in the sense of shameful to draw Y's attention to his clumsy way of eating (line 3). However, the mother's interest shifts shortly thereafter to Y's overly childish behavior (allowing his mother to serve him food with her chopsticks). She mocks Y's behavior, using the term hazukashii in the meaning of shameful or feeling ashamed (lines 12, 19). By doing this, the mother is repositioning Y's inappropriate behavior in the context of play. Here, she highlights the term hazukashii by introducing outsiders (here, kindergarten friends) to the participation framework of interaction. The attribution of others' emotions or feelings in utterances is one way that Japanese caregivers teach children to be sensitive to others (Clancy, 1986, p. 233). Moreover, by introducing a virtual third party, Japanese caregivers often create a playful and theatrical participation framework, which is usually less face threatening and can elicit socially desirable behaviors on the part of the child (Takada, 2013; Takada and Kawashima, 2016). Such utterance exchanges would provide the child with lived experiences to enable developing intersubjectivity and alterity (Demuth, 2013).

Children who are teased for the inappropriateness of their behaviors may develop their play further, or they may correct their previous action to affiliate with socially shared normativity. In Excerpt 4, however, Y does not immediately give the proper response, showing an ambiguous attitude. For this reason, the mother gradually upgraded the teasing (lines 16, 19, 20). Y's responses also changed accordingly and, eventually, he joined the theatrical play set up by his mother, bringing in his infant sister B.

According to Clancy (1986, pp. 237–238), teasing is used to train children's conformity by planting the fear of being laughed at by others. Benedict (1946) also discussed the importance of early teasing in that it nurtures the fear of ridicule in the child's later life. However, in this study, teasing is primarily in a playful context, and the orientation to conformity training is not strong. Rather, it is motivated to promote interactions in situ in a cooperative and pleasant atmosphere. Lo and Fung (2012) also found that a considerable proportion of spontaneously occurring shaming events at home are in a playful key (Lo and Fung, 2012, p. 181). Relative to other negative assessments that directly

fpsyg-10-01545 July 10, 2019 Time: 17:16 # 12

mark the speaker's intentionality, teasing in a playful context is less threatening to the child's face (Brown and Levinson, 1987). Teasing also facilitates a multiplicity of frames in conversations between children and caregivers.

In all of our cases, the caregivers attend to various semiotic fields (e.g., direction of gaze, facial expression, posture, intensity of action, seriousness of performance, and footing of action) (Goodwin, 2000), while monitoring minute changes in the child's action and situation associated with the child. Caregivers thereby connect diverse semiotic resources to display an empathetic attitude to the child (Excerpts 1 and 2) or create a cooperative and amusing atmosphere (Excerpts 3 and 4). In these ways, a phrase containing the term hazukashii indicates that the child did not perform an appropriate action with respect to the context of the specific social situation. Consequently, the different meanings of the term hazukashii (i.e., embarrassed, shy, ashamed, or shameful) are made available to the child in each context. In the course of the child's development, the meaning of ashamed, or shameful tends to appear relatively late, on the basis of the child's understanding of the meaning of embarrassed, or shy. In other words, developmentally, the people surrounding the child initially indicate/suggest what hazukashii means, and they then gradually start expecting that the child also feels hazukashii. Therefore, phrases including the term hazukashii, or emotional terms in general, function as a type of knot to establish a mesh, which then forms temporal "lines of becoming" (Ingold, 2007, 2013) involving various types of semiotic resources.

Japanese society is often described as a well-organized entity, structured with a variety of traditional social norms that can be referenced in numerous spheres of social life. However, actual practices may not coincide with social norms. Where this occurs, phrases including hazukashii can fill the gap between practice and norm. Then, the actor whose action is regarded as hazukashii performs a new action, which can justify, repair, or elaborate a prior action in a contextually appropriate manner. Through such exchanges, speaker and audience can cooperate in establishing an affective stance by which to affiliate with the socially shared normativity (cf. Goodwin et al., 2012; Cekaite and Björk-Willén, 2018). This affective stance is a powerful tool for the language socialization of children in a given speech community. As such, culture is incrementally attained through "the interactively organized process of public recognition of meaningful events" (Goodwin, 2000, p. 1492). In this sense, the caregiver's communicative style

## REFERENCES


is an important factor in the socialization of children to culturespecific values (Clancy, 1986, p. 218), and discursive practices in caregiver–child interaction construct a culturally distinct self (Demuth, 2013).

In a nutshell, emotional expressions and emotional experiences build sociality, and social activities construct emotions. These two mechanisms do not contradict one another. Rather, recursive interplay emerges through them. By combining the analysis of situated social interaction with ethnographic procedures we can reveal relationships between the two mechanisms to cultivate an interactional study of emotion, building a foundation for the better understanding of our lived culture.

# ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Ethics Review Committee at the Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Review Committee at the Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

AT made major contributions to the design of the manuscript, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and drafting the manuscript.

### FUNDING

This work was financially supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (S) "Cultural formation of responsibility in caregiver–child interactions" (Project No. 19672002 headed by AT), JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) "Cultural and ecological foundations of education and learning: An anthropological study on rhythm, imitation, and exchange" (Project No. 24242035 headed by AT), and JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) "Development of intersubjective recognition" (Project No. 17KT0057 headed by AT).


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Takada. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

fpsyg-10-01545 July 10, 2019 Time: 17:16 # 14

# Rethinking Intrusiveness: Exploring the Sequential Organization in Interactions Between Infants and Mothers

Valentina Fantasia1,2 \*, Laura Galbusera3,4, Corinna Reck <sup>5</sup> and Alessandra Fasulo<sup>6</sup>

<sup>1</sup> Department of Social and Developmental Psychology LInC-Interaction & Culture Laboratory, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, <sup>2</sup> Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin, Germany, <sup>3</sup> Inter-self Lab, Institut für Philosophie, Literatur, Wissenschaft und Technologiegeschichte, Geistes- und Bildungswissenschaften, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, <sup>4</sup> Hochschulklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie der Medizinischen Hochschule Brandenburg, Immanuel Klinik Rüdersdorf, Rüdersdorf, Germany, <sup>5</sup> Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, <sup>6</sup> Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

#### Edited by:

Pirkko Liisa Raudaskoski, Aalborg University, Denmark

#### Reviewed by:

Carly Butler, Loughborough Materials Characterisation Centre, Loughborough University, United Kingdom Marilena Fatigante, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

\*Correspondence: Valentina Fantasia valentina.fantasia86@gmail.com

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 20 February 2019 Accepted: 18 June 2019 Published: 24 July 2019

#### Citation:

Fantasia V, Galbusera L, Reck C and Fasulo A (2019) Rethinking Intrusiveness: Exploring the Sequential Organization in Interactions Between Infants and Mothers. Front. Psychol. 10:1543. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01543 To date, studies investigating maternal postpartum depression (PPD) have mainly focused on identifying failures in interactions of postpartum depressed mothers and their infants, often attributed to single dysfunctional maternal behaviors. Intrusiveness has been identified as a dysfunctional behavior characterizing mothers suffering from PPD. However, this research does not consider the co-constructed and sequential nature of social interactions, in which single behaviors cannot be conceived as isolated or disconnected units. The aim of the work presented in this paper was to explore the interactional dynamics underlying maternal behaviors previously identified as intrusive by mainstream literature on postpartum depression. Through a conversation analytical approach, we analyzed filmed interactions between mothers with and without postpartum depression and their 3-months-old infants. The analyses of 4 selected episodes illustrate similar dyadic activities, yet presenting different levels of mutuality and affective attunement. Results showed two normative features of social interactions that contributed to the different quality in the mutual adjustment of the partners: interactional rhythm and preliminaries. Interactional rhythm refers to the structuring of infants' spontaneous activity into a turn sequence, whereas preliminaries consist of verbal or nonverbal moves that anticipate following action. As evident from our analytical observations, what seems to be hindering the mutual coordination (previously labeled as "intrusive") is not based on specific individual behaviors but on the absence or violation of such interactional norms. Adopting an interactive and dynamical framework, we shifted the focus from maternal behaviors considered as dysfunctional to observing the unfolding of interactional aspects contributing to better or poorer sequential structuring. We argue that these aspects shape the possibilities for the infant's participation. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of adopting a conversation analytical approach for a better understanding of the relational dynamics related to clinical and non-clinical interactions.

Keywords: intrusiveness, interactional rhythms, postpartum depression, preliminaries, sequential organization

# INTRODUCTION

Since early after birth, infants are immersed in a world of social exchanges and affective interactions with their caregivers. Affective synchrony (Gratier and Devouche, 2011) and interactional coordination are two dimensions that have been recognized as essential for the infant to engage in early, mutually regulated interactions with adults, and more generally for communicative and social development (Jaffe et al., 2001; Trevarthen and Aitken, 2001; Lamb et al., 2002; Stern, 2002; Gratier, 2003; Tronick and Beeghly, 2011). Mutual regulation, however, is not an all-or-nothing property of interactions but rather a dynamic, moment my moment achievement reflecting the quality of mutual alignment and dis-alignments between participants as the interaction unfolds. Mutual regulation is therefore influenced by many different factors and circumstances, e.g. the infant's affective, social and cognitive growth. On the caregiver's side, for instance, clinical conditions may be hindering the possibility to experience mutual and affectively charged intersubjective exchanges, as in the case of postpartum depression (PPD). A long tradition of research has identified PPD as a clinical condition that may affect the quality of motherinfant early interactions, generally involving maternal affective withdrawal or intrusiveness as primary behavioral dimensions (Reck et al., 2017).

The aim of the work presented in this paper is to explore the interactional dynamics underlying maternal behaviors previously identified as intrusive. In the following sections of the paper we first introduce the concept of dyadic mutual regulation within the field of early infant-caregiver interactions, to then move on to discuss the circumstances in which this regulation process might be affected or altered, as in the case of postpartum depression. A theoretical revision of intrusiveness as an interactional phenomenon is then advanced, proposing an analytical approach that focuses on the structural aspects supporting (very early) interactions. By using a conversation analytical approach, filmed interactions between infants and mothers (with and without depression) participating in a study adopting a still-face paradigm were analyzed, enabling the systematic observation of two aspects as illustrative of the way even very early interactions are sequentially structured and ordered: interactional rhythms and preliminaries. We discuss these findings suggesting that traditional measures of intrusiveness fail to take into account the sequential relevance and organization of maternal actions, in relation to the actions of the infant. On the contrary, the sequential analysis applied can help clarify the interactional structures and dynamics underlying what has been so far identified as "intrusive maternal behavior" and thus set the ground for rethinking the very notion of intrusiveness within a more relational framework.

# Sequential Organization and Mutual Regulation: Key Aspects for Studying Infant-Caregiver Interactions

Over the past fifty years evidence from research on social, developmental and educational psychology have demonstrated the dynamical nature of early non-verbal interactions by focusing on the way caregivers (mostly mothers) and infants are mutually responsive to each other's movements, speech and affective displays. This evidence has supported a new conceptualization of caregivers-infants interactions as cooperative and jointly constructed (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Trevarthen, 1998), contrasting previous theoretical understanding of infants, especially in the first months, as passive and unintentional interactants. The co-constructed nature of early interactions was also emphasized by the Mutual Regulation Model (MRM, Tronick and Cohn, 1989; Tronick and Weinberg, 1997), one of the most well-established theoretical accounts of early intersubjective interactions. This model describes motherinfant interactions as patterns of moment-to-moment mutual adjustments that move from states of affective coordination and matching to states of affective dis-coordination and disengagement. Coordination and synchrony between the infant and the caregiver are not steady, but rather a complex, dynamic flow, where dis-coordinated moments are considered as normal interactive dis-alignment, usually followed by successful affective reparations (Tronick and Weinberg, 1997). Interaction is thus described as a structured system of mutually regulated units of behavior, as each partner's behavior is influenced and coordinated through the behavior of the other (Tronick et al., 1979; Cohn and Tronick, 1988). Based on this theory, Tronick et al. (1980) developed a scoring system called Monadic Phase System (MP) which captures behavioral dimensions of the mother and the infant such as gaze direction, vocalizations, facial expressions, head orientation and body position, and combines them into macro-categories called monadic phases. This instrument has been widely used in infant research.

More recently, observation-oriented infant studies have started looking at mother-infant communication through the lens of structural and conventional elements regulating adult communication. Thanks to the intrinsically dialogic nature of the methodology adopted, infants' behaviors (laughing, crying, gazing) have been identified not only (and always) as responses to the adult's move, but also as interactional initiatives (Trevarthen, 1977; Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Reddy and Uithol, 2015) upon which caregivers contingently act, treating them as turns in conversation-like sequences (Berducci, 2010; Rohlfing and Nomikou, 2014). Developmental research has long recognized the importance of early caregiver-infant exchanges structured as repetitive coordinated activity, so called "interaction formats" (Bruner, 1985) or social routines. Changing diaper (Nomikou and Rohlfing, 2011), performing a nursery-rhyme song (Fantasia et al., 2014), playing peak-a-boo (Nomikou et al., 2017), reading a book (Rossmanith et al., 2014) are social routines where the infant's participation is shaped by means of and through such highly familiar sequences. These routines present regularities essential in orienting the infants' behaviors toward established interactional practices and conventions (Leonardi et al., 2016) shaping the infant's emerging participation (Berducci, 2010; Fantasia et al., 2014, 2016). They therefore constitute contexts "in which to observe the process of shaping agentivity, because infants are treated as participants from early on" (Nomikou et al., 2017, p. 2). Participating in daily practices with more experienced speakers is also an essential moment of being socialized to the different aspects regulating more mature, sequentially-organized interactions, such as sharing the attentional focus, orienting toward the speaker or listener, taking turn after a silence, repairing misunderstandings. Within the field of conversation analytical methods, recent studies, very limited still, have revealed that early communicative exchanges are partially supported by some of the principles of interactional order active throughout adult life, such as turn-taking (Berducci, 2010), maximum standard silences (Hilbrink et al., 2015) and overlapping phenomena (Domingueza et al., 2016).

However, there are conditions that impact the continuity, frequency or quality of moments of mutual recognition and contact between infants and caregivers. On the infant's side, autism spectrum disorder has been recognized as a neurodevelopmental condition strongly affecting young children's possibility of intersubjective engagement with their caregivers. On the caregiver's side, postpartum depression (PPD) is one of the conditions best known to negatively influence the quality of interaction of mothers with their infant, including the mutual regulation of affects (Tronick and Weinberg, 1997; Reck et al., 2004). According to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), PPD is a psychological disorder that affects around 10% of new mothers (Cooper and Murray, 1997) and has been associated with later difficulties in children's emotional, cognitive and self-regulatory capacities (Field, 1984; Murray, 1992; Murray and Cooper, 1997; Lovejoy et al., 2000; Reck et al., 2017). Two behavioral dimensions have been proposed as critical with regard to the mother's depressive condition: withdrawal and intrusiveness. In the next section we focus on the latter, its theoretical background, methodological applications and limitations.

## Intrusiveness as Disruption of Mutual Regulation

The term intrusiveness is broadly used to describe behaviors causing undesired disruption or annoyance. Intrusive behaviors can involve physical or verbal actions, and can be experienced as affecting less visible dimensions, such as a violation in the sense of the self, and being therefore experienced as unwelcome or uninvited (Oxford Dictionary, 2019). Educational and developmental research has focused extensively on parental behaviors identified as intrusive across different contexts, ranging from studies linking parental beliefs and practices with children's emotional and cognitive development (Mortensen and Barnett, 2019) or schooling outcomes (Grolnick and Pomerantz, 2009; Liew et al., 2018), to the investigation of ethnic, social and economic factors influencing this aspect of parent-child interaction (Ispa et al., 2004). Although a recent study has proposed to look at intrusive behaviors also on the father's side (Olsavsky et al., 2019), intrusiveness seems to be considered primarily as a maternal characteristic, where the mother "has her own agenda in mind as she either overwhelms the child with excessive stimulation or interrupts the child's self-initiated activity to stop it or change its course" (Ispa et al., 2004, p. 1614).

This is particularly evident in infant research, where intrusiveness has been investigated by comparing healthy and clinical mothers. Initially, intrusive maternal behaviors have been described in terms of over-control and under-control (Ricks, 1981), and later reframed as over-stimulation and directiveness (Pine, 1992). Later on, some studies have re-assessed a set of maternal behaviors, initially included in the Monadic Phase Paradigm (MPP) and not related to intrusiveness, as intrusive. Behaviors such as anger/poke, disengage, elicit, play, originally described by the MPP, have been aggregated into macrocategories such as "disengaged," "positive," "mixed" and used to classify behavioral patterns of mothers (Cohn et al., 1986, 1990; Field et al., 1990; Campbell et al., 1995). Intrusive behaviors were characterized by low levels of play and high levels of anger (Cohn et al., 1986, 1990), and lower instances of mutual regulation, particularly in dyads in which the mother had postpartum depression (Cohn and Tronick, 1983; Murray et al., 1996; Reck et al., 2004, 2011; Beebe et al., 2008; Hatzinikolaou and Murray, 2010). Other studies have attributed intrusive character to single maternal behaviors occurring in a given time unit, such as rough handling of the infant, poking, pulling, tickling, interfering manipulation and using a loud tone of voice (Cohn et al., 1990; Malphurs et al., 1996; Diego et al., 2002), and/or an angry tone of voice (Tronick and Weinberg, 1997) and intrusive touch (Beebe et al., 2008).

In comparison to healthy controls, mothers with postpartum depression were found more prone to adopt either withdrawing or intrusive behaviors in the interaction with their infants (Reck et al., 2004; Beebe et al., 2008), presenting increased over-stimulation, negative and aggressive actions (e.g., irritation, anger, rough handling) disrupting affective synchrony and interactional coordination (Cohn and Tronick, 1983; Cohn et al., 1986, 1990; Field et al., 1990; Beebe et al., 2008). Such maternal conducts were found to match a corresponding tendency by the infant toward withdrawal, higher stress arousal and negative affect (Cohn et al., 1986, 1990; Field et al., 1988; Diego et al., 2002; Hatzinikolaou and Murray, 2010).

# Critical Issues With Current Definition and Assessment of Intrusiveness

In an attempt to describe the problematic relationship of a young girl with her clinical mother, Daniel Stern (2002) advanced criticisms to using the construct of intrusiveness as clinical index. He argued that intrusiveness is too large as a behavioral unit, too global and vague for clinical or observation purposes, and unpacking "intrusiveness" into smaller behaviors, such as head turns, gaze aversion or speed of physical approach would instead lead to its better clinical understanding.

In most of the studies just presented, clinical and non-clinical, individual behaviors of the mother and the infant were in the first instance assessed and considered separately and independently of each other. To account for the mutual and contingent nature of the interactions observed, ratings of individual behaviors are subsequently matched together by means of time series analyses (e.g., Field et al., 1990; Beebe et al., 2008). Although presenting undiscussed timing accuracy, the costs for this methodological procedure are relatively high in terms of ecological validity and interpretation of the results as the sequential character of any naturalistic interaction is lost. Indeed, considering a single behavior as analytical unit for identifying intrusiveness implies a lack of consideration for the sequential organization of the interaction, making it difficult, if not impossible, to establish whether the action of the infant or the caregiver is an initiative or a response, or how the two participants' acts might be otherwise sequentially linked; hence assuming that all maternal behaviors are initiatives, without the possibility to establish to what extent the infant's behavior contributes to the mother's (intrusive) actions. Yet, precisely in light of the mutual and affectively coordinated nature of very early interactions, mother's behavior is influenced by the infant as much as the other way round.

Additionally, the self-experience of a given manipulation or vocal stimulation by someone else may vary across different persons or change depending on timing, interactional context and in-the-moment affective state of that same person. As strongly suggested by previous research on language development and socialization (Bateson, 1994; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1994; Duranti, 2000), the same maternal behavior may assume different meanings and functions according to the sociocultural norms and nurturing practices and the specific maternal style (Mead and Macgregor, 1951; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986; Keller et al., 2004). Losing information on the broader sequence in which target behaviors occur impoverish the interpretation of that very behavior and its impact in the dynamical mutual coordination of the dyad. For example, daily caregiver-infant routines are largely based on physical actions on the body of the infant. Beside the necessary daily care activities, entertaining, and playing with infants implies a certain amount of bodily manipulation, sometimes in the form of control or physical guidance by the adult. Consider for instance early social games played by mothers and infants as early as 3 months of age, where multimodality is a necessary part through which bodily experiences and affects sharing occur: during these games the mother is pulling, poking, shaking, or holding the infant; yet, not only infants react with positive engagement to many of those occurrences, but they may react with distress if some component of these rich stimulatory activities is dropped (Fantasia et al., 2014; Nomikou et al., 2017). Assigning a pre-determined affective quality to individual behaviors result in a loss of analytical (and predictive) power on the impact of those specific behaviors or behavioral sequences on the infant.

Recently, improvements toward a more relational view of intrusiveness have been made by the Infant and Caregiver Engagement Phases, first in its original version (ICEP, Weinberg and Tronick, 1999) and then in the revised one (ICEP-R, Reck et al., 2008/2009). This coding instrument considers intrusive actions as those made "regardless of the infant's behavior," and characterized by a violation of the infant's autonomy. Examples of such behaviors are anticipating the infant's moves without waiting for the infant's response or interrupting the infant's self-initiated activity in order to pursue her own "program" (Weinberg and Tronick, 1999; Reck et al., 2008/2009). In the ICEP-R then, for the first time the caregiver's intrusive behavior is identified by taking into account the position of both interactants around each single act. Despite this important change, the ICEP-R operational definitions of intrusiveness, such as for example "too loud, too expressive or too close to her child" (Reck et al., 2008/2009, p.4), include consideration of the child but without specifying what dimensions of the child behavior are used by the coder to arrive at their definition of what is "too much."

Altogether, the issues just presented might account for inconsistencies in the way intrusiveness has been defined and studied in research so far, leading to a general interpretative weakness of this construct (Provenzi et al., 2018) and yielding relatively little definitive results concerning its impact on the infant's development and well-being (as especially revealed by cross-cultural studies, see for instance Ispa et al., 2004).

# Rethinking Intrusiveness: Exploring Mother-Infant Interactions Through a CA-Oriented Approach

If intrusiveness was identified at the behavioral level as a failure in coordination and mutual regulation, a similar interactional dis-alignment should be observed when adopting a different methodological framework. In this work we adopt Conversation Analysis (CA) for examining video-recorded episodes of interactions between clinical (diagnosed with postpartum depression, PPD) and non-clinical mothers, and their 3-months-old infants. CA is a method for studying social interactions developed within the ethnomethodological tradition (Garfinkel, 1967). This approach postulates that social actors use "methods" to make their actions reciprocally intelligible, as they are systematically adopted for the production and interpretation of social conduct. Central to CA is the focus on turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1974) and sequential organization, where each communicative turn is shaped by previous one(s) and creates the context for successive moves (Schegloff, 2007). Various levels of sequential organization contribute to the orderly coordination of social encounters and activities (Stivers, 2012). Lay "methods" for the production of talk-in-interaction include features of speech delivery such as volume, intonation and pace, as well as other communication modalities such as gestures, gaze and body movement. In order to take into account such resources, CA has developed a transcription system that captures features of oral speech (Jefferson, 2004) and multimodal behavior without giving a priori importance to one modality over the other (Mondada, 2016). Such level of detail is oriented to identify the way turns are designed to achieve specific actions (Drew, 2013) for example a greeting or an offer—and to calibrate interactional dimensions such as alignment and affiliation (Stivers, 2012). The aforementioned characteristics of CA make it suitable to the analysis of early interactions, in which different modalities are mobilized simultaneously around the infant.

Through the adoption of this robust and reliable method, our work aimed at investigating whether the construct of intrusiveness could be further analyzed within a more interactional view. This would entail identifying features of multimodal turns and interactional sequences that would pinpoint how the defining characteristic of intrusiveness, i.e., the restriction of the infants' possibilities for action and participation, comes about. More broadly, we are interested in exploring the compatibility of the mutual regulation paradigm with interactional types of analysis such as CA, and attempt to outline avenues for collaboration with clinical research.

# METHOD

The data selected and analyzed for this study were part of a larger study conducted by Reck et al. (2011). The original study included 28 mothers with current postpartum depression (PPD, according to the ICD-10), 34 healthy mothers recruited from local maternity clinics, and their 3-months-old infants. All clinical mothers and their children were receiving inpatient treatment at the mother–infant unit of the psychiatric Heidelberg University Hospital. Both inpatient and external dyads were video-recorded in the Babylab of the hospital, as participants to a study involving a Still-face paradigm procedure (Tronick et al., 1979; Weinberg et al., 2006). The Still-face is an experimental paradigm consisting of three phases (of 2 min each in this study). In the initial phase the mother is instructed to freely interact with her infant, seated in front of her in a babyseat. After this, the mother is asked to remain still for the entire duration of the Stillface phase, instructed not to move, show any facial expression or respond in any way to the infant, remaining "completely unresponsive, with a flat expressionless face" (Tronick et al., 1978). Finally, in the reunion phase, mother and infant interact freely again.

The video recording of interactions during the Still Face procedure were coded using the Infant and Caregiver Engagement Phases-Revised (ICEP-R, Reck et al., 2008/2009). The study was approved by the independent ethics committee of the University Medical Faculty, Heidelberg. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

## The Present Study

The present study focuses on the free play during the reunion phase following the Still-face. During this phase, the mother's attempts to recover from the experimentally induced distress are more likely to lead to moments of intrusiveness (Weinberg et al., 2006). An initial phase of exploratory observations of filmed interactional episodes in which the mothers' behaviors were coded as intrusive in the original study was carried out. A first sample of episodes was selected during this phase, including both episodes in which mother and infant appeared as positively engaged as well as episodes in which the infant displayed higher level of disengagement, negative facial expressions or distressed vocalization. Since our aim was to shed light on the characteristic features that could discriminate positive and negative interactional outcomes of similar actions equally labeled as intrusive, we first selected two episodes including behaviors coded as intrusive according to the ICEP-R in the original study, but showing visible positive affective engagement (episodes 1 and 3). We then paired each of these episodes with episodes presenting similar activities or behaviors but visible negative affects (episodes 2 and 4).

All episodes were transcribed with ELAN (Sloetjes and Wittenburg, 2008) a software which allows several distinct lines of transcriptions (e.g., gestures, vocalization, gaze) linked together to the same video or audio data. Participants have been given pseudonyms, and the images of both mothers and infants are displayed as anonymous drawings to ensure confidentiality.

TABLE 1 | Information on the selected dyads and episodes.


**Table 1** summarizes information regarding the selected dyads. This phenomenologically-driven approach to data selection allowed us to target our analytical process on the interactional aspects contributing to the positive or negative quality of engagement and alignment of the participants. Three of the four selected episodes were re-transcribed with the CA notation adapted for multimodality (Jefferson, 2004; Mondada, 2016). Of episode 4 we only have the ELAN transcription as we lost access to the videos, which per confidentiality agreement could only be accessed in the Heidelberg lab. The transcription symbols are described in **Appendix A**. The images come from split screen video grabs showing mother and child from two different cameras. The images' correspondence to the transcript is indicated in the transcript itself. The same symbol in adjacent lines (<sup>∗</sup> , +, or ++) indicates simultaneous occurrence of what follows; r- and l-hand mean right and left hand. English translations of the turns in German are added within the transcript.

# DATA ANALYSIS

The CA-informed analysis highlighted two distinctive aspects of the sequential organization that differed in the paired episodes: interactional rhythms (Gratier, 2003; Gratier et al., 2015) and pre-sequences (Schegloff, 1980, 1988).

# Interactional Rhythms

The following episodes involve two mother-infant dyads engaged in interactions primarily structured around the mother's use of hands movements accompanied by vocal comments. Comparing these episodes, differences in the sequential properties and affective quality of the interactions have emerged even though the activities occurring within them may appear similar on the surface.

#### Episode 1

Extract 1a is the introduction to the hands movement game which is the focus of the comparison in this section, and it begins approximately a minute after the end of the Still face phase. Claire, the mother, had reentered the interaction slowly, touching the infant's feet and talking to him, then gently shaking his wrists. After a few seconds the infant had pulled himself up toward her, and she had drawn him closer and kissed his hands. She had then released him down slowly with a long "Ah" sounds, then said the first "Ja super" (not shown) with a large waving movement of the arms. As the extract begins, she repeats the same phrase ("Ja super") two more times, while introducing a new movement of her hands.

#### **Extract 1a**

[MUM: CLAIRE; INFANT: TOM, 3 months. M7: 00.05.17– 00.05.40]

The transcription symbols in the extracts are described in **Appendix A**. The images come from split screen video grabs showing mother and child from two different cameras. The images' correspondence to the transcript is indicated in the transcript itself. The same symbol in adjacent lines (<sup>∗</sup> , +, or ++) indicates simultaneous occurrence of what follows; r- and l-hand mean right and left hand. English translations of the turns in German are added within the transcript.


In lines 1–9 we observe the introduction of the playful movement of lifting up and moving the hands in the air, in front of the infant's face. Two cycles of lifting and taking the hands down occur simultaneously to two repetitions of the "Ja super" phrase; the repeated phrases are separated by about 2 s in which the mother gazes at the infant, says "Mh?," then waits some more, her hands resting on the infant's legs. The infant is active at the beginning and keeps his gaze on Claire's hands (lines 1–3); when he becomes reabsorbed in stimuli coming from his own body (line 8), Claire repeats the 'Ja super' and the hand movement, both toned down with respect to the first time. This re-attracts Tom's gaze and, shortly after Claire's movements have stopped, he looks at her hands and touches them.

Claire's turn that includes the verbal "Ja super," coordinated with the hand wave, are prosodically similar with a distinct rise-and-fall shape; however, in their width and intensity they are responsive to the infant's level of engagement (higher first,

FIGURE 1 | Illustration of Extract 1a. From left to right figures: (a,b).

tossing limbs about and smiling, looking down with the fist in his mouth); both iterations of the phrase are followed by a gap in verbal and body activity from the mother. **Figures 1a,b, 2a,b** illustrate the excursions in both Claire's turns, from peak (raised hands and sound production) to conclusion. The tempo is one in which each combined verbal and movement phase is approximately as long as the following pauses (lines 6 and 11) in talk and movement, with continuous gaze. Twice in those spaces the infant reaches out for the mother's hands (lines 5 and 11); once his activity displays instead a slight drop in the engagement toward the mother. The mother's actions appear contingent to the infant's, both from a sequential and intonational point of view, either initiating a new turn building up from the infant's touch (line 6) or adjusting to the changed level of the infant's engagement (line 9). In the continuation of the extract Claire takes her hands closer to the infant's face, circling them and waving her fingers for longer bouts of movement than in the previous extracts.

#### **Extract 1b**



After Tom touches Claire's hand (end of extract 1a), Claire does a third hand lift, and this time elaborates on the movement, waving one hand and moving the fingers while talking very softly. This lasts about 5 s (lines 12–23), during which the infant moves his arms and mostly gazes at the mother's hands, with what appears as a moderate level of engagement. On the phrase "Wenn ich noch das Lied wüsste, wie das Lied ging" (tr. "If I knew the song, how the song went"), pronounced with a higher pitch, Claire stops the hand movement and makes a playful frowning face (**Figure 2a**); here the infant laughs, and shakes body and head more markedly. To this, Claire responds with a vocal prolonged laugh (line 25) and a broad headshake (**Figure 2b**). It appears that, when intensifying the infant's stimulation in one modality (the hand wave), the mother plays down the other modalities, speaking softly and maintaining a moderate display of affect with her face. Later, while adding intensity to her voice and facial expression, she retreats the hand, and at this 'rounding up' of her action the infant laughs and has an excited generalized reaction. Claire's response to this, which mirrors the infant's action (open mouth, body shake), amplifies the infant's agentic move.

In the final extract we follow this dyad to the end of the hand-movement game.

#### **Extract 1c**



After the positive reaction of the baby at the hand waving, Claire repeats the movement, briefly, and each time rests her hands down after. Tom keeps smiling broadly at first, with open arms and an intent gaze. On the second lift he starts moving his hand to this mouth, and on the third, which Claire concludes by shaking Tom's wrist, turns both his body and head away, with a frown and a loud vocalization (lines 29–33). Upon Tom's last movements, Claire lowers her hands onto his, but softly, so he has enough strength to move her hand outward. She frees her hands and moves them to the infant's feet. Speaking softly, she pulls his feet up from the toes, and Tom looks at her hands on his feet.

In this last sequence, we have observed the mother performing a hand game she had previously introduced in two short cycles, after the infant's positive affect display, and swiftly reorganizing her movements and body arrangement when the child displayed a change in affect and engagement. When he did so, she distanced the stimuli (the hands) from the baby's body, retreating also

with her trunk, and stayed with the baby's feet, still talking to him. The mother's facial expression changed contingently to the changes in the child apparent emotion, softening the smiles into a neutral and at times even "puzzled" expression, which twice in this extract had the effect of moving the child into action.

To summarize, we have seen that the hand-waving as an interactional object was introduced and maintained through several bouts of action, each separated by an interval of relative stillness, in which the mother's facial expression became more neutral and her body stilled; during the resting phases, she kept the gaze on the infant, and was either silent or spoke softly. The mother also acted on the infant's cues, and increased the intensity of her activity as he gave increasing signs of engagement.

#### Episode 2

Extract two also begins less than a minute after the Still-face, and includes a hand waving motion alternated to body contact. At the end of the still phase there had been a momentary distress response, followed by a smile by the infant as the mother talked and held his hands.

#### **Extract 2a**

MUM: JENNY, INFANT: JACK (3 months) [SG1 M34: 05:02]

1. JEN: ∗Leans forward ∗Achtung, Watch out ∗ waves RH fingers, thumb still in Jack's LH 2. JEN: +Da ist wieder

die[Zappelha:nd, Here comes the wriggling hand + waves fingers


∗waves RH fingers + closes palm and starts finger-snapping

	- +takes LH to mouth

The hand movement appears for the first time with a finger waving motion when Jack is still holding the mother's thumb, therefore very close to his body and face. The baby seems to be still engaged with his own tactile experience, but at the second repetition of the mother's sentence "Da ist wieder die Zappelhand" (tr. "Here comes the wriggling hand") he looks up to her face and hand. Here Jenny seamlessly goes into the finger-snapping, which has also a sound component. The hand is still in close proximity to the child's face. Jack seems engaged by the new stimulus, as he looks at the hand and moves his arm rhythmically (line 6). About 2 s into the finger snapping the infant vocalizes and moves his hand toward the mouth (line 8), a well-known selfsoothing behavior in infancy. Jenny reacts to the vocalization as if it was a positive reaction to the game, saying a sort of aspirated "Ja" (Yes) and smiling more deeply, while continuing fingersnapping. The infant takes his other hand to mouth then both hands to his face, vocalizes in a more distressed tone and moves his head away. Jenny continues finger snapping and smiling, and repeats "Die Zappelhand," until Jack utters a third vocalization, now longer and sounding more distressed, with more hand movements covering the face. Here Jenny stops her movement to inquire about his seemingly changed mood ("Was"–"What," line 16). We discuss briefly this segment before looking at the resolution of this episode.

Jenny's hand movements have been continuous, with no rest phases in between; her facial expression was steady, smiling throughout although with some variation in intensity. Her trunk was leaning over toward the baby for the whole time, and the movements of the hands performed in the proximity of the infant. None of her gestures are per se bound to create discomfort: at different times in the interaction the infant reacted to them with either interest or with withdrawal. However, there is an absence of any kind of 'pulse' in the activity, of the kind we

FIGURE 4 | Illustration of Extract 2a. From left to right figures: (a,b).

observed in extract 1a,b, and c. The steadfast progression and display of the same affect configuration appear distressing for the infant already a few seconds into the episode. He becomes louder, the hands in the mouth or covering the eyes, with longheld frowns. The pattern that seems to be emerging here is that of a stimulation that is held until the infant 'breaks free' of it: when eventually there are clear signs of discomfort and withdrawal, the mother's actions become more clearly responsive and contingent.

#### **Extract 2b**


Jenny's words ("Hast du keine Lust mehr," tr. "You don't fancy it any more" and "Oh bist du müde," tr. "Oh are you tired") reveal that she has noticed the mood change and interprets it as related to the hand game. She does not, however, completely pause the infant's stimulation: she stops the hand movement but takes hold of the infant's hands. Then, still holding Jack's hand, she moves her fingers across his body (lines 18 and 20). The infant gazes back to the mother and stops vocalizing, but does not lower his fists and looks at his mum from above his own hands, still covering most of his face. There is a sense of the infant not 'lowering his guard' here, not completely letting go of the

body tension and cover. After this, Jenny holds Jack's hands and opens his arms outward, to which Jack abruptly throws his left arm up, letting go of the mother's grip. The mother acknowledges these actions as indicating trouble (line 26) and keeps soothing him by keeping his hand in hers and poking gently the infant's forehead with the other, leaning closer. Again, the infant reacts to the mother's voice positively, looking at her and briefly smiling, keeping his body leaning on one side, his face partially covered, and vocalizes with a distressed tone.

Worth noticing, Jenny has kept smiling throughout, her expression not being modulated by the infant's changes in affect. There is a constant flow of physical touch in this interaction, so that the pauses between verbal utterances do not create a segmentation in the mother's activity. It is worth emphasizing that the hand movement and touching of the infant's body are the primary modality of communication in these examples (Bremner and Spence, 2017), and therefore the one in which the different rhythms manifest with more salience for the child.

#### Comparing Episode 1 and 2

Comparing analyses of episodes 1 and 2, it becomes visible that properties of the mother's action that seem more significant in terms of positive vs. negative engagement relate to duration and rhythmical quality of the actions, rather than to the movements per se. In episode 1 the rhythm of mother's actions toward the infant—hand waving and touching—was made of cycles, the end of each marked by a change in affect and body distancing. Not only metaphorically, but also literally the infant was given space during the intervals; there, he would rearrange his limbs, inspect the mother's expression and gaze, and either perform bids for re-engagement or self-centered actions, giving the mother the opportunity to adjust her successive actions accordingly.

In the second episode, the infant interactional and physical space was more constrained. Separate bouts of talk from the mother happened on the background of continuous, very prominent hand movements; the baby's own movements and vocalization overlapped with hers, ending up being somewhat absorbed within them, until a more patent withdrawal was performed. Even after the infant clear distressed reaction, the mother maintained physical proximity and active touching, mirrored by the physical protective posture of the infant. Interestingly, the infant's agency was supported more when he expressed negative affect. This sustained interactional rhythm, in other words, while stimulus-rich and apt to involve the infant in dyadic communication, included fewer opportunities for him to notice the effects of his activity and re-experience some of its qualities as reflected in the mother's mirroring of them (as happened in episode 1).

Finally, a feature of the first episode we have not touched on above is the introductory phase in which the hand game had been performed with less intensity and proximity (the hand circling movement was performed in shorter repetitions and distant from the child's body). Upon the infant's attention and engagement, the mother developed the movement, sustaining it after for a longer time and going closer to the infant's body and face. The introductory phase contributes to creating a smooth interaction in which an activity that might have been considered intrusive in isolation, is familiarized to the child slowly but progressively. This phase was missing in the second episode in which a rather intense hand game from the point of view of duration and proximity had started abruptly in its full form. The importance of preliminary phases in infant-directed activities will be expanded in the following paragraph.

# Preliminaries

The episodes presented below show two different dyads engaging in a similar series of playful lifting/pulling up sequences. In both episodes, the mother's action (holding of infant's wrist and pulling up movement) had been coded as intrusive according to the ICEP-R criteria. However, while the structure of episode 3 includes a preliminary sequence to the pull up action, in episode 4 the structure is flat, i.e., the repetitions of the pullup movement are similar to each other, without a discernible sequential development.

#### Episode 3

Episode 3 begins with the infant seated in a babyseat and the mother on a chair in front of him, both looking at each other.

#### **Extract 3a**

MUM: AMY, INFANT: MIKE [SG1 M106 00. 04.54–00.05.02]




The episode starts with Mike, the infant, and Amy, the mother, smiling while looking at each other. Mike then makes a vocalization (line 1) and gazes away. Amy imitates Mike producing a similar sound, still smiling, and Mike briefly gazes back at her. He then makes postural adjustments (arches back, chin up, legs tucked up) which are treated by Amy as a preparatory initiative to lifting himself up. She aligns with Mike's attempt by verbally formulating it ("Oh, willst du aufstehen?," tr. "Oh, would you like to come up?," line 10). After a brief pause, when the infant orients back toward the mother by looking at her and moving his head, Amy repeats her question with a more marked ascendant intonation accompanied by head nodding (("Oh, willst du aufstehen?," tr. "Oh, would you like to come up?," line 13). To this, Mike makes a soft vocalization and smiles. Amy then reinforces her previous comment by making an explicit invitation for jointly acting ("Komm wir ueben mal,"

tr. "Let's have a go," line 17). Before the end of Amy's turn Mike lifts himself up on its own strength, adopting the same pattern of movements used previously. Amy, holding the infant' hands, makes a coordinated action which complements the infant's movement by sustaining his lifting action toward her. She accompanies her movements with a bright smile and a positive assessment of the infant's initiative ("Ah, genau," tr. "Ah, that's it," line 19). Once Mike is completely upright and close to Amy's face, she makes an additional non-verbal preliminary move toward the accomplishment of the first part of the action (that is, the end of the lifting movement), by leaning forward and kissing the infant on his forehead (line 21). After that, the infant slowly releases his body moving back toward the babyseat. Amy holds the infant's hand throughout this second part of the interactional sequence. Once Mike is almost lain down, the mother makes a comment to mark the closing of the lifting/pulling-up sequence in the form of a positive verbal assessment ("Super," line 23) to which the infant smiles broadly. This comment may serve as preliminary announcement of the closing of activity, which is accomplished by the infant returned in his original position and the mother oriented toward him, smiling and holding his face.

Between this initial episode and the one presented below (extract 3b) four more pulling/lifting activities occur, each initiated by a movement of the infant and followed by a metapragmatic comment of the mother inviting the infant to repeat the activity once more ("Nochmal? "tr. "Again"). For two times the mother makes a preliminary announcement of the forthcoming action verbalizing her counting ("Eins, Zwei, Drei" tr. "One, two, three") before starting the pulling/lifting activity. The closing of each sequence of actions is accomplished by a positive verbal assessment like "Sehr gut" (tr. "Very good") or "Super."

In their last lifting/pulling sequence (Extract 3b) the mother and the infant seem to negotiate the end of the interaction by marking its completion (the mother), disengaging from the interactional space (the infant's turning the head away) and both displaying a neutral face, in contrast to the overall positive affect display that had characterized their facial expressions up to this point.

#### **Extract 3b**


The sequence begins with a downturned vocalization of the infant displaying a neutral face (line 25). The mother then aligns with Mike's affective display at two levels: she acknowledges the infant's vocal production by repeating it (with the same intonation) and yet, at the same time, she downgrades her affective display from positive to neutral (line 28). After that, she multimodally aligns with the infant's affective display by making a vocalization ("ah") with a descendent intonation (line 30). After a brief pause, the infant then starts lifting himself up. The mother acknowledges this attempt as an invitation to do an additional cycle of pulling/lifting activity and responds to it with a positive assessment ("Ja," tr. "Yes"), yet in a whispering monotone way, mirroring the infant's affective tone. While the infant is still moving up and has not yet completed his lifting movement, the mother protrudes her lips in a kissing-shape and then leans forward to kiss him on the forehead, catching

on the infant's forehead when he is not completely upright, but still moving. She thus anticipates the closing of the action, preannouncing the end of the entire cycle and overall activity of the pulling/lifting kind. After his mother's kiss, Mike moves back onto the babyseat, suckling his mother's thumb with a neutral expression, and eventually turning his head and gaze away. Amy keeps looking at him, yet displaying a neutral expression, with downturned lips. The activity is finished.

In the extracts just described the infant's participation is facilitated by an overall clear sequential structuring of each pulling/lifting sequence, guided by the mother who builds up each successive move on to the infant's previous one. Particularly relevant in this episode is the use of multimodal preliminary moves by the mother to prepare the ground for the next relevant action, being it the opening or closing of the activity. Preliminaries, also defined as pre-sequences (Schegloff, 1980), are a generic term for a class of conversational moves projecting what comes next. They are specific to the type of conversational content following them (e.g., pre-invitation, or story preface) and include a form of acknowledgment from the recipient. In this episode, Mike's vocalization and lifting up movements (line 18) may be seen as an acknowledgment of the mother's preliminary invitation to perform a joint lifting activity. The closing of the sequential pulling up activity is also systematically and multimodally anticipated by the mother through a kiss on the infant's forehead (as in lines 21 and 37), followed by a positive verbal assessment to mark the (successful) completion of the activity.

#### Episode 4

The following episode also revolves around a pulling/lifting sequence with infant and mother as participants, yet important differences with the previous episode emerged during the analysis. Due to limited access to the original video, this episode is presented in a different "format" compared to the previous ones. The analytical approach (CA oriented) remains nevertheless the same.

#### **Extract 4**

[Mum: Sara, Infant: Jim [SG1 M3 00.10.50–00.13.6]


16. Gazes at I, neutral face

At the beginning of this episode, Jim and Sara are oriented toward each other. Sara displays a close-lips smile while Jim has a neutral face. Jim then raises the right arm toward the mother, while the whole body is slightly leaning forward. He keeps a steady gaze on to the mother, holding this position for about 3.5 s. The mother acknowledges the infant's movement of the arm making a verbal comment with a low, un-modulated tone ("Was willst du machen?," Tr. "What do you want to do?). This comment presents a rather different pragmatic quality compared to the one made by the mother in episode 3. Here, the mother is not asking the infant specifically what he's doing. She does not verbally reformulate the infant's movement but rather makes a comment, which seems to mark the un-specificity of the infant's move, implying that this was not understood by the mother. A pause of about 3 s follows (line 3), during which the mother is looking at the infant, smiling, while the infant's body and head is partially oriented on the opposite side, yet still looking at the mother. Despite acknowledging the infant's initiative, the mother does not build upon it, leaving an empty interactional space though maintaining her engagement with the infant by keeping smiling at him. After this pause, she closes her hands on the infant's wrists, opens up his arms and moves them up. Then, she suddenly begins to pull the infant toward her (line 5) by holding him on the wrist. Since there is no clear announcement of the mother's intention to pull the infant's up, nor is there any behavioral or verbal sign marking the beginning of the action (with the exception of the mother's holding and opening the infant's arms), Jim appears as not fully prepared to join in Amy's move. Indeed, his body is passively pulled forward by the mother rather than actively lifting up on its own strength. Such passivity is visible in his arms, outstretched but not tensed; similarly, Jim's trunk appears to bear no forward tension. Jim's head is bent forward, embedded into his outstretched arms, hindering the possibility of looking at the mother or being looked at on the face (line 10). When Jim is completely lifted up, the physical space between him and the mother is still considerably wide, as if the lifting was not fully accomplished. Then she slowly moves Jim back toward the babyseat. During the descending movements his head is leaning sideways and floppy, while Jim is not looking at the mother but at the side of the room.

Two more similar sequences follow lasting respectively, 2.5 and 3s, each coming quickly after the previous one with almost no pause in between. The movement coordination of pulling (by the mother) and lifting (by the infant) sequences seems to improve over time. Jim's arms are bent and not outstretched, the head is sustained upright and the back position is not arched anymore. Similarly, the mother's body is also less tensed, as if the efforts in pulling the infant's up were slowly decreasing. While after each lifting/pulling sequence the dyad is more coordinated, the affective quality displayed by the dyad in this interaction remains dis-aligned the mother displaying a still, un-modulated smile and the infant showing a still, neutral facial expression. There seems to be no progress or modulation in the affective engagement of Jim and Sara.

#### Comparing Episodes 3 and 4

Although presenting a similar pattern of actions, our microanalyses have revealed important differences in the quality of engagement and modalities of infant's participation between the episodes just described. In both episodes the mothers make the infant's initiative explicit by verbalizing it, and then acting upon it to build up an entertaining and co-constructed interactive exchange (Berducci, 2010). However, only in episode 3 these initiatives are also quickly reused by the mother (lines 9 and 13) to formulate an invitation for engaging in a shared activity (line 18). The presence of preliminary moves by the mother contributes to a broader clear structuring of the activity as a defined event, presenting clear marking of boundaries such as openings and closures, introduced by preliminary moves which make the activity more visible and predictable for the infant. The use of a preliminary sequence, accomplished by a combination of multimodal actions, seems to be of critical importance for establishing a shared orientation with the infant before the activity begins.

On the contrary, but in accordance with the key interactional aspects emerged in episode 3, Jim's lack of preparation evident in episode 4 seems partially related to a delay in the mother's contingent alignment with the infant's activity, at least at the beginning of the sequence (a similar phenomena was described by Fantasia et al., 2016). The poor quality of Jim's engagement might be accounted for by a lack of sequential structuring of the sequence, of the kind described above. The affective disalignment emerged in episode 4 might be related to a maternal difficulty in contingently responding to the infant's feedback. The infant's initial movement of the arm is not promptly acknowledged by the mother, becoming a missed opportunity to use the infant's initiative as a preliminary marker for the beginning of the lifting/pulling sequence.

The presence of pauses within and in between each lifting/pulling sequence is an additional aspect of the interactional organization differentiating the two dyads observed. Pauses, silent gaps between interactants, may have different functions depending on their duration and place in the interaction. They create spaces of no-action where participants can change or repair the ongoing activity, alternate the speaker's turn or signal an intention to end the interaction (Jefferson, 1988). At the end of extract 3, for instance, a very brief pause marks the closure of the interaction, as both the infant and the mother do not upgrade or relaunch the activity but rather let it gradually die out. In episode 4, on the contrary, the fast succession of lifting, one straight after the other, does not leave such spaces, offering little opportunities for the infant or the mother to smoothly introduce variations to the ongoing activity (in this sense, extract 3 echoes extract 1 in the importance of rhythm in the delivery of engagement bids from the mother).

Finally, the affective quality emerging from the analyses differs noticeably between the two episodes. In episode 3, mother and infant display a variety and modulation of affects, both positive and negative, shared as participants align with each other's affective state and leading to an increasingly playful quality of the lifting/pulling sequences, or a gradual shared disengagement, as showed in extract 3b. In episode 4, despite a visible improvement in the coordination of pulling and lifting sequences over time, there seems to be almost no progression in the quality of affects, neither at the level of individual's affective display nor at the interactional level. In other words, both the mother and the infant present a frozen affective quality during the course of the interaction expressed by the infant's neutral face and the mother un-modulated smiling.

# DISCUSSION

The aim of the work presented in this paper was to explore the interactional dynamics underlying maternal behaviors previously identified as intrusive by mainstream literature on postpartum depression. To do so, a conversation analytical approach was adopted to analyse a small sample of clinical and non-clinical mother-infant dyads, observed during a Still-face experimental procedure. Two aspects concerning the sequential structuring emerged in the analyse accounting for the affective differences of the dyadic engagement: interactional rhythm and preliminaries.

In episodes 1 and 2 interactional rhythm emerged as a discriminatory dimension in the occurrence of resting phases between consecutive action bouts, and relative modulations on the affective configuration both in conjunction with the caregiver's own action and as a response to the child's variations. Comparing episodes 1 and 2 has shown that properties of the mother's action that seem more significant in terms of positive vs. negative engagement actually relate to duration and rhythmical quality of the actions, rather than the single movements per se. A longer activity time was functional for slowly but systematically integrating the infant's moves within the sequences of activity. Similarly, the presence of an introductory phase contributed to smoothen the interaction, insofar as an activity that might have been considered intrusive in isolation (waving hands closely to the infant's face) is familiarized to the infant slowly but progressively. This phase was missing in the second episode, where the modulation of the mother's own 'presence' over time as a combination of physical proximity, touch movement and vocal stimulation was not aligned with the infant's affective feedback. Interactional rhythms characterized by continuous stimulation and absence of sequential boundaries can lead to an imbalance in the interactional participation, as highlighted in episode 2.

In episode 3 the presence of preliminary moves accomplished by a combination of multimodal actions appeared as a central element giving visibility to the sequential organization of the activity. In adult conversation, preliminaries are utterances that help listeners understand the trajectory of the talk and be responsive in pertinent places (Schegloff, 1980, 1988). In our analyses, they seem to fulfill two main functions: a) creating a shared focus of attention, orienting the infant toward the mother before any activity begins and 2) making the next interactional turn more predictable for the infant, helping him to "anticipate a "now" moment and to coordinate actions with another" (Goodwin, 2017:84). Preliminaries, along with the presence of pauses within and between sequences of activity, are part of the mother's practice of encapsulating each lifting/pulling sequence into a defined event, with a clear opening and closure, aligning not only with the infant's action but also with his affective tone. In this way, an overarching frame for the single but jointly constructed activities is provided, shaped in a narrativelike excursion developed over time. In episode 4 the engaging attempts by the mother are also expressed in the building up of pulling/lifting sequences taking into account the infant's initial pulling up attempt. The fast pace with which each of these sequences follow one after the other, however, underlines how the poor sequential structuring seems predictive of temporal and affective dis-alignments, as the possibilities for the mutual coordination of actions and affects are limited.

The findings emerged from our observations have two main implications. First, they call for a serious reflection on the theoretical assumptions and methodological practices endorsed by mother-infant research, especially that involving clinical participants. Our analyses uphold the main criticism advanced in the introduction section toward accounts of intrusiveness considering individual actions in isolation, or even in a single action-response sequence, as indicative of a felicitous or less felicitous interaction. Actions such as holding the infant's hand, pulling, physically invading the infant's space are necessary maneuvers to commence a new action, or responses to the infant's initiative, as emerged in episodes 3 and 4. They are part of the way everyday situations are accomplished and regulated by adults, who perform actions with and on infants, without whom infants would not survive. Although theoretically grounded or inspired by the Mutual Regulation Model, mutuality and affective coordination seem to have moved to the background in previous studies adopting time-series analysis of single behaviors to assess dyadic engagement. In these studies, the focus of investigation has therefore shifted from how mother and infant mutually coordinate to what the mother does with or on the infant, assuming that all maternal behaviors are initiatives (such as cutting across or interrupting the infant's action) instead of responses or attempts to align with the infant's communicative signs. Within this view, the infant then becomes a recipient for someone else's action instead of being a participant in a shared activity. On the contrary, a CA approach considering sequences of activities as analytical units supported an evaluation of the interdependence level of each partner's respective acts, supporting a clearer picture of the interactional sequences facilitating or restricting the infant's participation.

Secondly, our analyses suggest that what seems to be predictive and discriminative of positive and negative interactional outcomes of similar actions is the normative organization pertaining to the order and structure of the interactional sequence. Analyzing longer sequences including iterations of an act or pauses enabled the consideration of timing and variations in intensity across repeated actions, as well as the identification of interactional rhythm and sequential organization (including preliminaries) as important aspects of this normative organization. Although they have been identified here as analytically separate, these aspects are nevertheless part of the same dialogic and interactional dimension whose structure became more visible thanks to the robust and reliable conversation analytic framework. Although limited to only four examples, our findings seem to complement recent empirical evidence that even very young infants are able to understand and anticipate well-known self-directed actions (Reddy et al., 2013) particularly when these actions present invariants in timing and sequential structuring (Fantasia et al., 2016). The clear structuring of episode 1 and 3, sustained by the presence of preliminaries and transition spaces may be seen as a foundational framework within which infants make experience of this emerging capacity, progressively gaining more resources and chances to be a partner in different types of interactional formats.

A brief methodological consideration on the clinical as well as analytical implications of using the Still-face paradigm for testing mother-infant spontaneous interactions can be advanced. During the Still-face procedure a strict spatial configuration is imposed on to participants: mother and infant are positioned face to face, with the infant still (literally) fastened in the babyseat and the mother seating in front of her. No objects or toys are allowed. As a result, while the mother can make use of a variety of interactional resources (with some limitations, for instance she cannot stand up or get the infant off the babyseat), the infant has very little room for moving, or changing activity. In other words the mother has possibilities for initiating or maintaining the activity that are instead limited in the case of the infant, leading to e.g., unbalanced proportions of actions performed within the dyad as increased number and variety of actions by the mother. Differences between depressed and non-depressed mothers have been observed mainly in the reunion phase of the still-face (Weinberg et al., 2006); the extremely challenging nature of this phase should be thus taken into consideration when interpreting the different outcomes of the episodes analyzed in this paper.

A final remark in the present discussion is needed to stress that this study did not aim to compare the quality of interactions in two populations (i.e., depressed vs. nondepressed mothers), but rather to unpack the interactional dimensions at play in episodes identified as intrusive under mainstream descriptions. Whether these interactional patterns characterize mothers with psychological difficulties more than non-clinical mothers, and whether they extend over the first months of an infant life is for further research to establish. Although it is not possible to ignore that these aspects were played differently by the mothers diagnosed with postpartum depression, this difference may be due to a variety of factors, including the pressure of the experimental condition (higher for clinical mothers), which may have induced PPD mothers to overstimulate the children or keep an "upbeat" attitude throughout.

#### REFERENCES


We are aware that the analysis of episode 4 present a far less accurate and fine-grained level of details, affecting the overall analytical power and interpretation not only of that specific episode but also of the conclusion we have attempted to draw. The strength of our claims in this work has been calibrated accordingly.

To conclude, the findings provided by the present study may be considered one step on the way to the development of new conceptualizations, ethnomethodologically oriented, that would inform the theory and method of future research in clinical and non-clinical populations. Although the boundaries between stimulating and restricting are not easy to draw, our analyses have shown a central weakness in the very idea of intrusiveness that is not resolutive but opens new questions, such as: how do we distinguish between behaviors which are positively stimulating the infant and others that are undermining their autonomy? And what can be the meaning of 'autonomy' in the context of the infant's action? We feel that future research focusing on the development of infant's capacities to participate in orderly, sequential interactions should take these questions into account.

#### DATA AVAILABILITY

All datasets generated for this study are included in the manuscript and/or the supplementary files.

#### ETHICS STATEMENT

This study is based on the analysis of already collected data from a previous study. Ethical approval from the University Medical Faculty, Heidelberg was granted for the original study. In this paper we maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of the data.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

VF, LG, and AF analyzed the data and wrote the paper. CR provided the data and revised the paper.

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network TESIS: Toward and Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity under Grant FP7-PEOPLE-2010-INT, 264828. We would like to thank Thomas Fuchs and Vasu Reddy for their support during the study and their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. LG also gratefully acknowledges financial support from the project MTI-engAge (16SV109) funded by BMBF.


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The reviewer MF declared a shared affiliation, with no collaboration, with one of the authors VF, to the handling editor at time of review.

Copyright © 2019 Fantasia, Galbusera, Reck and Fasulo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# APPENDIX A

#### Transcription Symbols

Adapted from Jefferson (2004)


# Emotion Socialization in Teacher-Child Interaction: Teachers' Responses to Children's Negative Emotions

#### *Asta Cekaite1 and Anna Ekström2 \**

*1 Child Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, 2 Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKE), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden*

The present study examines 1- to 5-year-old children's emotion socialization in an early childhood educational setting (a preschool) in Sweden. Specifically, it examines social situations where teachers respond to children's negative emotional expressions and negatively emotionally charged social acts, characterized by anger, irritation, and distress. Data consisted of 14 h of video observations of daily activities, recorded in a public Swedish preschool, located in a suburban middle-class area and include 35 children and 5 preschool teachers. By adopting a sociocultural perspective on children's development and socialization, the study examines the communicative practices through which the expressions of negative emotions are responded to and the norms and values that are communicated through these practices. The data are analyzed by using multimodal analysis of interaction that provides a tool for detailed analysis of participants' verbal and embodied actions and sense-making. The analyses show that teachers responded to children's negatively charged emotional expressions as social acts (that were normatively evaluated), and the adults instructed children how to modify their social conduct (rather than deploying explicit discussions about emotions). The teachers used communicative genres that prioritized general moral principles and implemented the non-negotiability of norms over individual children's emotional-volitional perspectives and individual preferences. The teachers' instructive socializing activities were characterized by movement between multiple temporal horizons, i.e., general (emotional) discourse that transcended the hereand-now, and specific instructions targeting the children's conduct in a current situation. The study discusses how emotion socialization can be related to the institutional characteristics and collective participatory social conditions of early childhood education.

Keywords: social interaction, child-adult interaction, emotion socialization, norms and values, emotion regulation

# INTRODUCTION

The present study addresses children's emotion socialization as part of social interactional practices that take place in a preschool, a setting that constitutes a pervasive part of young children's lives in post-industrial societies. In Sweden, 84% of children between the ages of 1 and 5 years attend early childhood education, and the average time they spend there is 31 h

*Edited by:* 

*Sanna Raudaskoski, University of Tampere, Finland*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Lena Almqvist, Mälardalen University College, Sweden Chryssoula Karakitsou, American College of Greece, Greece*

> *\*Correspondence: Anna Ekström anna.ekstrom@liu.se*

#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 01 February 2019 Accepted: 18 June 2019 Published: 14 August 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Cekaite A and Ekström A (2019) Emotion Socialization in Teacher-Child Interaction: Teachers' Responses to Children's Negative Emotions. Front. Psychol. 10:1546. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01546*

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Cekaite and Ekström Emotion Socialization in Teacher-Child Interaction

per week (Skolverket, 2013, 2017). Arguably, this means that emotional experiences children face as part of institutional activities significantly contribute to children's emotional development (Denham et al., 2012). While emotions are associated with psychological states (individual experiences of happiness, sadness, or anger), and bodily reactions (such as heartbeat frequency or muscle tension), emotional displays or emotional stances, defined as embodied and verbal (evaluative) displays of emotion toward a particular focus of concern (usually somebody else's action) (Goodwin et al., 2012), are also an integral part of social life with clear normative elements. Human affective engagement is a normative practice, both in the way emotion displays are a learnt and acquired competence, and in relation to cultural normative values they mediate (Harré and Gillet, 1994; Baerveldt and Voestermans, 2005; Demuth, 2013). For children, the normative aspects of affective engagement are essential to their emotional competences and are addressed through socialization into a shared culture of emotions. Emotion socialization is defined as a dynamic process, involving a broad range of social – verbal and embodied – practices, through which caregivers mediate community-relevant ways of expressing and interpreting emotions. It is suggested that young children's "development of emotion regulation is one of the central goals of early socialization because of its importance to social competence, academic achievement" (Thompson, 2015, p. 173) and psychological well-being. However, while we know a great deal about socialization by parents (and especially, mothers, Denham et al., 2012; Wainryb and Recchia, 2014), there is a certain gap in our understanding of what characterizes children's emotion socialization in early childhood educational settings and, specifically, how early childhood teachers can act as socializers of young children's emotional expressions and normatively appropriate conduct.

The aim of the present study is to examine and describe children's emotion socialization in an early childhood educational setting: a preschool in Sweden. Drawing on video recordings of daily activities, we analyze situations where teachers respond to 1- to 5-year-old children's negative emotions such as anger, irritation and distress (and regulate children's emotionally valorized acts). The research questions are: (1) how do teachers respond to children's negative emotional expressions; (2) how are the social meaning and normative evaluation of such emotional expressions (as social acts) achieved through the communicative practices of teachers and children; (3) what characterizes the interpretative frameworks (e.g., general normative or individual volitional, as well as present or hypothetical, future-oriented) that the teachers deploy in their responses to children's negative emotional displays.

The aim of the present study is thus not to track the developmental aspects of children's emotion expressions. Rather, we explore the normative evaluation (and implicit regulation) of children's negative emotion expressions and related social acts as it is accomplished through embodied practices of social interaction in an institutional setting. In that displays of negative emotions have a propensity to indicate a difficulty or a problem, for example, that "one lacks what one desires or one's wellbeing is threatened" (Demuth, 2013, p. 18) or that a conflict arises, they are clearly normatively significant and frequently invoke caregivers' response. In such cases, the situational and cultural appropriateness of children's emotionally charged social acts becomes a matter of caregivers' normative evaluation (Kvist, 2018; Cekaite, in press a). We will discuss how emotion socialization can be related to the institutional characteristics and collective participatory conditions of early childhood education. We use a social interactional perspective (Goodwin, 2018) in order to further the understanding of norms and values related to the expression of emotions promoted in these interactions, as well as the interactional – discursive and embodied – practices used to communicate these norms and values. An additional aim of the study is to demonstrate and discuss how multimodal interaction analysis, that attends to situated character of human conduct and to the embodied features of socialization, can provide a fruitful addition to studies on emotion socialization.

# THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

Recently, various perspectives (including cultural psychology) have demonstrated increasing acknowledgement that children's emotion socialization and development are anchored within caregiver-child interactions, and are thereby influenced by sociocultural processes, norms, and values (Holodynski and Friedlmeier, 2010). Related perspectives exhibit an increasing focus on human agency and dynamic features of socialization (Kuczynski and Knafo, 2013). Development of shared values, as well as emotional expressions, is thus conducted through participation in embodied and materially anchored practices of social interaction, more specifically, in particular communicative genres (as recurrent types of social activities, Bakhtin, 1986; Linell, 2009; Demuth, 2013). Moreover, socialization involves not only continuity and conformity (i.e., adherence to and acculturation into common societal norms) but also the possibility of change and the emergence of novelty (Kuczynski and Knafo, 2013, p. 324), and therefore, analytical perspectives can fruitfully pay attention to the interactional emergent features of socializing encounters. This implies that one has to inductively examine both adult instructions and children's negotiations of norms and values in order to uncover the ways in which adults and children construct and interpret emotional expressions and their normative appropriateness.

Anthropological perspectives on cultural processes of socialization (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989, 2012; Harkness and Super, 1992) have developed an approach that conceptualizes socialization as a process that involves implicit and explicit socializing actions and encounters. Explicit socialization is associated with instructional actions (accomplished by adults or by children's peers) that spell out the prevalent norms and educate children's conduct. Explicit socializing acts can clarify and correct children's actions and emotional expressions and provide various kinds of instructions about affective and social values. Implicit socialization is associated primarily with ways of acting that constitute a common, non-explicit way of attending to emotionally valorized actions and their appropriateness. While a significant part of this research has been directed at the use of language resources as emotional stances, connecting socialization to language and culture (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2012), recent theorization of human sociality directs attention to human actions as embodied, both corporeal and language based, and located in material space (Goodwin, 2018). Goodwin et al. (2012) suggest that a speaker's performance of emotional stance is a situated, sequentially positioned act that displays emotion as socially responsive and consequential for future interaction. It involves the use of intonation, gesture, body posture, facial expressions, and talk. Such a holistic, interactional, and multisemiotic view of emotions differs from a view of emotions as something that resides within the individual and is expressed primarily verbally through meta-level lexical glosses ("sad," "upset," "angry," etc.). Rather, emotions are associated with social acts (located in social interaction), and are responsive to something (e.g., a phenomenon or somebody's actions) and directed at somebody. They are inextricably linked with social moral and normative orders that simultaneously provide the evaluative framework for the assessment of social meaning and appropriateness of the emotion (Harré and Gillet, 1994). In a situated sense, emotional stances are linked to activities and practices (Goodwin et al., 2012) and the way activities unfold becomes a resource for children's learning of emotional competence, including how one's actions and emotional expressions fit the normatively expected organization and flow of activity. In this way, repeated participation in social interaction provides a socioculturally anchored template for children's emotional and social learning.

#### Socialization of Negative Emotions in Family Settings

Negative emotions have received extensive attention in research on young children's emotion socialization, primarily in studies of families, and especially between mother and child. Emotion socialization involves both socialization for discernment of specific emotions, and emotion regulation as a way to develop emotional competences (Thompson, 2015). Emotion regulation, defined as the ability to handle emotions in order to cope in various situations (Denham et al., 2012, p. 2), is considered one of the major foci and achievements in children's social development. Research has identified parental strategies such as modeling, responding, and instructing, and it suggests that children, through observation of adults' emotional conduct, can learn which emotions are acceptable and how to express and regulate them. Parents' responding to and teaching of emotions involve strategies that instruct children through adults' responses (validating or criticizing), and inform or instruct children about emotions by linking children's experiences, situations, and verbal labels into "coherent scripts about emotional experience" (Denham et al., 2012, p. 4) and parent-child talk advances children's emotion understanding (Thompson, 2015).

Cultural psychological studies have approached the socialization of infants' negative emotions by examining motherchild encounters in various cultural settings (Friedlmeier and Trommsdorff, 2011). They suggest that infants' negative emotions are socialized differently by parents who orient to children's autonomy and self-expression (parents validate negative emotions and scaffold self-regulation) and by parents in societies where self-expression weighs less than subservience to common values (and where parents enact emotional restraint with their children). This research perspective has been modified to more clearly account for situational and communicative resources that express various normative orientations to children's negative emotions. For instance, Demuth (2013), p. 9, in a discursive psychological study has examined how German middle-class and Nso rural mothers used various communicative genres (Linell, 2009) that positioned the child as "a quasi-equal negotiation partner versus positioning the child as having to obey and comply with a hierarchical setting." Mothers used various discursive practices: those that mitigated possibilities for overt control by providing rationale, reasoning and maneuvering. These strategies worked to secure an alignment of perspectives between mothers and children. Contrastive strategies were used by (rural) mothers who, in response to children's negative emotional expressions and acts, implemented "overtly directive strategies" that expressed non-negotiability and "nonacceptance of the child's behavior" (Demuth, 2013, p. 18).

Furthermore, in a study of Swedish middle-class family practices (parent – child interactions), Goodwin and Cekaite (2018) identified a communicative style that was used in response to children's negative emotions (in their resistance to parental directives). Negotiations, reasoning, and covert parental control were prevalent and children were given extensive opportunities to re-negotiate parental decisions, by, for instance, using pleading stances to get the parent to align with the child's desires and wishes. Recurrently, children's (emotional) autonomy was confirmed and valued by parents.

Parent-child talk can also provide a socialization template for advanced and complex moral reasoning (Wainryb and Recchia, 2014), and some of the studies argue strongly that parent-child moral dialogue provides a more conducive environment for children's active participation and negotiation of moral discourse (compared to institutional educational settings). Examples of actions toward others that consistently invoke moral reasoning and reactions include harm to another, unfairness, and unequal treatment (Sterponi, 2009, 2014). These actions do not stand alone; rather, they are usually intertwined with negative emotional expressions. Moral and emotional features of conduct become inextricably linked in social interaction and socialization (Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018).

#### Early Childhood Education as a Context for Emotion and Moral Socialization

In addition to family, which has been a primary focus of emotion socialization research, institutional early childhood settings (especially in Western countries) have become significant contexts for development and socialization for children from an early age. Educational settings teach norms and values as well as related emotional displays (Cekaite, 2012a,b, 2013), and children learn in institutionalized practices that are characterized by communication and shared activities, anchored in traditions, and shared normative expectations and societal values. Early child care and education constitute social settings that differ from families in relation to the goals of the institution, participant constellations, and the intimacy of social relations. The multiple institutional goals in this collective setting include both care and education. Here, individual volition and general perspective on common good come into a close, and at times, controversial perspective. Participation in educational settings requires children's appropriation of normative expectations (Evaldsson and Melander, 2017) that guide non-conflictual conduct, including embodied aspects of participation and expressing or concealing emotions. While these norms are not the primary socialization and learning goals for early education institutions, they constitute an inherent part of socialization and learning practice, and are often a responsibility of teachers.

Research on children's emotion socialization (taking an anthropological perspective) examines normative expectations that characterize teacher-child and peer interactions in these early education settings. For instance, Ahn (2010) in her longitudinal ethnographic study of a middle-class preschool in the U.S. shows that teachers expressed and socialized children into emotion narrativity, and taught children to verbalize and label negative emotions ("I'm scared") as a proper way of acting and preventing conflicts in the peer group. At the same time, children recycled this socializing message creatively by transforming it in arranging their peer relations (e.g., trying to ingratiate or exclude someone), rather than following the adults' normative expectations. In other cultural contexts, such as a Korean preschool, it is teachers' feelings and children's responsibility for not making the teacher sad that were instilled through teachers' disciplining practices (Ahn, 2016). In a longitudinal ethnographic study from a Japanese preschool, teachers' immediate responses to children's crying in peer conflicts characterized negative emotional expressions as social acts that clearly impeded on the social harmony of the group and had to be stopped (Burdelski, 2010).

Several ethnographic (video-observation studies) from various Swedish educational settings for young children (preschool, kindergarten, and primary schools) show that emotion socialization is characterized by teachers' readiness to comfort, acknowledge, and show empathy and compassion to the crying child (Cekaite and Kvist, 2017) or, in case of children's conflicts, readiness to engage in routinized discursive negotiation practices that invite children's narrative telling of events and experiences (Cekaite, 2012a,b, 2013, in press a; Kvist, 2018). The latter discursive practices can be seen as representative of non-assertive but determined communicative genre. In children's peer groups, such mundane and recurrent social activities as play constitute a significant social template where social relations are negotiated, and where there is considerable space for negative emotion expressions, normative transgressions, and conflicts (Goodwin, 2006; Danby and Theobald, 2012; Karlsson et al., 2017; Björk-Willén, 2018; Kvist, 2018).

These studies point to the importance of examining socialization in early childhood collective institutions with a particular focus on how negative emotion displays are evaluated in relation to individual and collective action preferences within the institutional normative frameworks of interpretation. Understanding emotional underpinnings of activities requires an examination of the details of interaction, taking into account "the practice in children's everyday institutions and the conditions the society gives children for development" together with an attempt to grasp children's engagements, motivations, and perspectives (Hedegaard 2009, p. 64).

# MATERIALS AND METHODS

#### Participants and Setting

The study was conducted in a public Swedish preschool for children from 1 to 5 years old, located in a suburban middleclass area in a middle-sized Swedish town. Public preschools constitute the main early childhood settings for educare and are attended by approximately 84% of children in Sweden (Skolverket, 2017). The commission of preschools is to serve parents with childcare when they work and at the same time to educate the children. Their aims and work methods are defined by Swedish National Curriculum. A holistic approach to child development, learning and emotional well-being is foregrounded. Children's development of understanding the others' perspectives and solidarity are defined as important goals for teachers.

The participants at the preschool include five female teachers1 (four university educated teachers and one child-carer) and 35 children (19 girls and 16 boys). A total of 15 children were between 1 and 3 years old (nine girls and six boys), and 20 children were 3–5 years old (10 girls and 10 boys). The preschool was initially contacted with a formal request to the municipality's education department and school leadership regarding their interest to participate in the study. School leaders then informed staff about the study and inquired whether they would be interested to participate. The parents of the children were informed about the study and parents' written consent was obtained. The research team was external to the setting and had no affiliation to the preschool or municipality.

# Data Materials

The data consists of 14 h of video observations conducted during a period of 6 months. The data were collected for the purpose of investigating the recurrent practices of children's emotional and moral socialization in early childhood education, as part of a larger project on children's emotion socialization2 . The recordings were made using the principle of "unmotivated looking," but with specific attention given to activities were emotions were expressed or verbally discussed. The researcher visited the pre-school during two periods in 2015, spring and autumn, and got to know the children. During the video recordings, the researcher ensured that the children were comfortable with being filmed by engaging in some initial conversation, and she responded if the children initiated contact.

<sup>1</sup> In this article, the term teacher is used to refer to all educators working at the preschool.

<sup>2</sup> The data was collected by Disa Bergnehr, a researcher in the project "Communicating emotions, embodying morality," financed by the Swedish Research Council (PI Asta Cekaite).

Usually, the researcher mainly took an observing position and did not actively participate in the preschool activities. In cases of physical conflicts between children or prolonged signs of distress, the researcher called the responsible institutional representative/teacher.

The recordings were conducted using a handheld camera. The documented activities were part of the regular preschool day and included (1) free-play activity where the children were able to choose with whom and what to play, and when they spent time together in smaller friendship groups (approx. 6.5 h); (2) teacher-led organized activities such as circle time, snack time or lunches, educational activities such as book reading, arts and craft, and singing (approx. 7.5 h). The use of audio-visual recordings allowed to capture both vocal and embodied conduct and constituted an important resource as "video data enable the analyst to consider how the local ecology of objects, artefacts, texts, tools, and technologies feature in and impact on the action and activity under scrutiny" (Heath et al., 2010, p. 7). It was therefore possible to study the activities under scrutiny over and over again. The re-playability of recordings made it possible to understand how various communicative resources work together and to explore the local organization of practical action and reasoning as sequentially achieved.

#### Ethical Considerations

The study was subjected to ethical vetting by a regional committee for research ethics3 . Written and oral information was provided to staff and parents, and a consent form was signed for those adults who wished to participate (for parents, this consent also included their children). When visiting the preschool, the researcher frequently asked the children's permission for recording, and the researcher was sensitive to signs of discomfort from the children that could be associated with being observed for the study. To avoid for the participants to be recognized, detailed information about the participants is not provided, and the sketches used for illustrative purposes are anonymized.

## Method and Analytical Approach

The data is analyzed by using multimodal analysis of interaction (Mondada, 2016; Goodwin, 2018) that provides a tool for detailed analysis of participants' verbal and embodied actions and sense-making practices as ways trough which social and cultural order is achieved in naturalistic, face-to-face interactions. This ethnomethodologically inspired approach is concerned with social actors' actions and collective procedures of social order, described by attending to the social actors' endogenous, emic perspectives on social practices, rather than individuals'

Sandbäcksgatan 7 581 83 Linköping, Sweden. intentions. Social actors' situated meaning-making procedures and their continuous engagement in production of social order are characteristically documented through video-recordings of social practices (Cekaite, in press b).

Multimodal analysis of an interaction considers the sequential organization of language practices, the embodied participation frameworks, objects, and fine-tuning of participants' attention to these objects, public display of affective stances, as well as the broader, sociocultural features of the institutional setting. The point of departure is not an examination of isolated sentences, but sequences of actions where talk is embedded in and shaped by preceding actors' actions. By examining sequences of participants' actions, we can therefore document and describe how social actors make visible for each other the meaning of each other's actions. This practice of *in situ* sense-making on a turn-by-turn basis takes place in an ongoing activity and therefore the social activity context is a necessary analytical level in the analysis of the participants' social cultural practices, and their social worlds. A point of departure for studies investigating social activities as embodied and situated in a material context is an acknowledgment that participants make use of a variety of semiotic resources including vocal actions, gaze, gestures, mimics, bodily orientation, touch, and manipulation of objects when building actions together. The interplay between vocal contributions, bodily conduct, and the material surrounding has been described using the metaphor of an ecology (Goodwin, 2003, p. 35) indicating the existence of a number of communicative resources evolving when multiple participants build relevant meanings and actions together. As frequently argued, the various resources used for communication ought to be understood as mutually supporting and co-dependent systems working together when conveying meaning, rather than as distinctive, self-containing meaning making systems possible to investigate as separate entities (Goodwin, 1981, 2007; Streeck et al., 2011).

The social interactional approach emphasizes the importance of emotional stances in moment-to-moment emergence of social situations, in that they contribute to aligning participants into the co-operative organization of a common course of action (Goodwin, 2018). A focus on intersubjectivity as an achievement of the participants on sequential basis is central to multimodal analysis of interaction and is studied through the ways participants themselves display their understandings of each other's actions and the unfolding course of events: it is in the response to an action that the recipients of this action display their understanding of what is going on (Sacks et al., 1974).

## Analytical Procedure

The analysis began with one of the authors repeatedly viewing the video data and logging sequences where a teacher in some way responded to and addressed children's negative emotional expressions. The categorization of emotional stances and socializing instructional actions was based on previous research (e.g., Goodwin et al., 2012; Demuth, 2013) and was refined during analysis in relation to the verbal and embodied conduct of the participants. In the selection of episodes, any kind of response or address the teachers directed toward the child's

<sup>3</sup> Regionala etikprövningsnämnden i Linköping, Avdelning för prövning av. övrig forskning. (Regional ethical board in Linköping, Section for probation of general research). Affiliation/Address: Linköping University Hälsouniversitets kansli

expression of a negative emotion was included, thereby the data extended beyond the adults' responses that explicitly verbally labeled and discussed emotions.

The episodes were analytically selected according to when they started and ended and how the teachers dealt with children's negative emotional expressions. The episode started when a child or group of children expressed a negative emotion and, in response to that, the teacher addressed the child or group of children. The episode ended when the teacher re-oriented to another task or changed the conversational topic. A total of 49 episodes where an individual child or a group of children expressed negative emotions – such as frustration, irritation, or distress – and the teacher addressed the child/children were identified. The episodes were related to a variety of events: children's peer conflicts, their dissatisfaction with the scheduled activities, or the teachers' ways of conducting them, as well as mundane instrumental actions such as problems tying shoelaces and serving food. The identified episodes were more common in teacher-led activities (36 episodes) than free-play activities (13 episodes).

In the next analytical step, the episodes were analyzed by both authors according to the participants' emotional stances, the problem the participants oriented toward, and the teachers' socializing instructional actions. This analysis revealed that teachers mainly directed their socializing comments and actions toward children's negatively charged actions rather than explicitly orienting to their feelings. Many episodes (39) were rather short and consisted of the child's negative emotion-expression; teachers' response; and a resolution of the problematic situation. A total of 10 episodes involved teachers' extended responses and instructional acts. Such extended episodes are "informationrich" in that from them "one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the inquiry" (Patton, 2002, p. 273). The article presents detailed analysis of three extended instructional episodes that are particularly information-rich in relation to teachers' explicit and implicit approaches to children's negative emotional stances and actions, and ways in which the teachers elaborated and explicated norms and values.

Extended instructional sequences were chosen because they have a potential to reveal and contribute to understanding cultural and moral orders as relevant aspects that are clarified and spelled out for the children to learn. In this way, the teachers' explications became analytically available to the researcher, and instructional episodes constituted a *perspicuous setting* (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 181 ff) for the study of human sociality and activities. The extended episodes were qualitatively similar to the shorter ones in respect to the teachers' socializing actions and their focus on the children's behavior, disciplining and validation of children's emotion expression, and reorganization of activities to solve problems. The episodes include both teacher-led activities and free play, and illustrate two overarching characteristics: how socializing instructions oscillate between general principles and situated practicalities and how instructional activities are directed toward children's actions within multiple temporal horizons. Repeated data sessions and discussions within a research group4 with extensive experience of analyzing preschool activities contributed to discerning the specific findings constituting the results, and final interpretations were checked with the research group.

#### Transcriptions

The transcripts were produced for the analytic work and for presenting analytic results. Data were transcribed verbatim and translated to English. Embodied conduct relevant for the analyses were included in the transcripts both as descriptions within double parenthesis and with the use of anonymized drawings based on frame grabs from video clips5 . Short silences are marked with number of second within brackets, e.g., (0.5) for a half second silence or a (.) for pauses shorter than 0.2 s.

#### RESULTS

Children's negative emotion displays were usually associated with social actions that constituted parts of peer interactions, gatherings, or play (see also Kvist, 2018). In peer conflict situations, the preschool teachers were faced with a number of complex tasks that required them to attend to and support children's emotional needs and well-being, orient toward educational goals of the preschool, and sustain a smooth flow of activities on an organizational level. The teachers were engaged in various participation constellations, and had to both attend to children on an individual basis and supervise the child group. These multiple tasks were intimately related and managed simultaneously as part of the same situation by using a range of interactional socializing practices that implicitly or explicitly managed – corrected, criticized, or instructed – the children's conduct and emotional expressions.

Notably, there were considerable tensions between the individual children's actions, emotional experiences and volition, and the collective and general norms of conduct and feelings. The socializing messages and cultural norms that were promoted by the preschool teachers toward the children can be characterized as exhibiting a certain amount of social control and subservience toward social and institutional norms (c.f. Demuth, 2013). The non-negotiable character of institutional norms was instantiated by the teachers through the use of mitigated directive strategies that avoided confrontation with the children. Simultaneously, in extended episodes, these communicative genres (Linell, 2009) supported, invited and presented a certain amount of reasoning, explaining, and listening to the child's individual or collective perspective. The teachers employed communicative genres comprising reasoning and persuasive mode by using questions, directives, and prohibitives to engage or inform the children; requested their narratives and tellings of their perspective; exemplified hypothetical/future situations; and instructed children's talk and actions. Yet another

<sup>4</sup> The research group consists of researchers and doctoral students at the Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University.

<sup>5</sup> The figures (line drawings) are original and have not been used, published, or reproduced from before. They are produced for our research study specifically.

feature of the teachers' socializing instructions oriented to and explicated multiple temporal and causal horizons that connected past untoward event, present emotional display, and conflict resolution, as well as socialization to future conduct. The teachers attended to individual cases and generalized norms of conduct, focusing on specific individual cases or generic types of situations.

In what follows, we will use examples from three group activities to illustrate the teachers' various strategies to address children's emotion socialization and the mutual co-construction of social norms through preschool interactions. The examples do not represent mutually exclusive categories or practices. Rather, they demonstrate the communicative instantiation of similar educational practices that were identified in the video-observational data.

#### Teachers' Use of Specific Action as Grounds for Providing General Guidelines

In the preschool setting, the specific children's negative emotional stances (such as upset or whining) were oriented to, criticized, and corrected by the teachers who stated and explicated the normative transgression (exemplifying, for instance, what constituted appropriate or inappropriate emotional response to particular kind of action). Tensions between an individual child's emotional stances, including corporeal experiences, and general institutional norms of good conduct and feelings were resolved by the teachers who favored the perspective of the collective. The individual child's behavior and negative emotional expressions were used as grounds for general disciplining designed to be instructive to both the individual and the larger group of children.

In **Figure 1**, nine children wait for the teacher to distribute snacks. As customary, they sit in a sofa closely together, and it frequently happens that they touch each other. Sometimes the corporeal contact provokes the children's emotionally charged responses. Here, Anna (2.5 years old) sits Karen (3 years old) and Victor (2.5 years old). A bit further away sits Hilma (3 years old), who also participates in the interaction. Several times someone, presumably Karen, engages in physical contact with Anna, who with a whiny, loud voice repeatedly expresses her dislike with "ouch/aj." When Victor with a cheeky look in his face touches Anna's arm, she once again complains "ouch/aj." The teacher then addresses the children as a collective and negatively evaluates their conduct toward each other: "you (plr.) have a bit of a bad attitude toward each other/ni är tråkiga mot varandra." Upon setting this negative moral evaluative ground, the teacher singles out Anna's emotional stance and criticizes her negative response to Victor's touch.

The teacher does not immediately specify which behavior is wrong, with a decisive voice telling the children that they exhibit "bad attitude toward each other/är lite tråkiga mot varandra" (line 06). Rather, the specification of what constitutes "bad attitude" is done by addressing a particular child's – Anna's – negative emotional stance and conduct, her whining "ouch" reaction toward Victor's touch. The teacher states a general norm ("one doesn't have to say 'ouch' just because someone does this/man behöver inte saga aj bara för att nån gör så här," lines 07–08) as she reaches out to touch Anna's foot. The teacher's disciplining (prohibitive that tells what not to do) highlights the discrepancy between the normatively expected tactile sensation of touch and the child's emotional stance and expression of pain. Notably, the teacher does not invite the explication of the individual child's perspective on her sensorial experiences, but presents her with a statement as already shared knowledge and non-negotiable common ground (particle "ju" in Swedish indicates the speaker's assumption that this is shared knowledge): "it doesn't hurt (ju) when someone touches you/det gör ju inte ont när nån tar på en" (line 09). Notably, the teacher's instructional disciplining is embodied: she actually re-enacts the way Victor touched Anna, simultaneously subjecting Anna to supposedly similar tactile experience that allegedly caused Anna's negative affect and whining expression of pain.

However, despite the teacher's determined stance in her disciplining, Anna disagrees (she indicates that it does hurt, line 10) and the child's opposing opinion elicits the teacher's rhetorical question about Anna's tactile experiences: "do you think it hurts when someone pats you/tycker du att det gör ont om nån klappar på dig" (line 11). Despite the teacher's focus on Anna's individual perspectives, she still focuses on more general aspects of touch, and she shifts the verb from a neutral "touching/ta på" to a verb that denotes a soft and intimate touch and that has a clear positive connotation, "patting/klappa." The intonational pattern of the question suggests that this is a mild challenge to Anna's stance. The teacher thereby strengthens her stance that Anna's reaction is not adequate to the action that precipitated it and, despite Anna's persistence in contrasting opinion (line 12), she terminates their discussion.

As demonstrated, in her instructions, the teacher puts forward a general normative perspective according to which certain negative emotional stances (toward the others' bodily actions) are inappropriate and have to be modified. The interaction with the specific child aims at socializing and correcting her conduct and emotional expressions on the basis of the general normative expectations, rather than, for instance, a thorough inquiry about the specific child's subjective corporeal experiences of touch. The general and non-negotiable format of the disciplining statements allows the teacher to provide both Anna, and also the group of children, with concrete examples of an inappropriate emotional stance and conduct, and also locate them within the general normative interpretive framework.

#### Children as Co-creators of Moral and Emotional Order

In a Swedish multiparty preschool context, where multiple children – a collective of the peer group – are present (and are potential participants), the teachers were not the sole representatives of the normative interpretation of children's actions and emotions. The teachers' socializing instructions, even when they were directed at a specific child, became discursive affordance for the other children who could comment on and join the conversation and address the normative interpretation of specific individual cases. The peer group thereby displayed their abilities to interpret and comment on other children's emotional expressions and contribute to the development of an emotional order, in such a way necessitating the dynamics of persuasive communicative genre in preschool interactions.


In **Figure 2** (continuation of **Figure 1**), Hilma re-initiates and sustains the discussion about touch, although the teacher is ready to move on to snacking.

Hilma introduces an alternative view on Anna's reaction to Victor's touch: maybe Victor patted Anna in a rough way (line 14). The teacher, however, does not accept Hilma's interpretation and she instantly states that Victor did not pat Anna in a rough way. In what follows, Hilma pursues the interpretation that foregrounds the individual child's emotions and volition, several times suggesting that maybe Anna did not want to be patted (lines 19 and 21). She refers to individual preferences rather than general guidelines of how to experience and to respond to a particular kind of touch. However, the teacher is busy disciplining Karen, telling her to stop (lines 18, 22, and 24). Karen puts her feet on Anna's leg and tries to push Anna away, despite Anna's loud whining protest. The teacher thus normatively discriminates between various kinds of touch between the children – patting and pushing – and assigns them and their responsive actions, the children's corporeal experiences and concurrent emotional stances, different values. Pushing (with one's feet) is considered inappropriate and is decisively disciplined.

When Hilma directs the discussion toward Anna's preferences and whether or not she wanted to be touched by Victor, this aspect is not subjected to any corrections or instructions from the teacher. Even if Anna did not want Victor to touch her, the teacher takes an accumulative view on Anna's negative emotional stance, characterizing them as inappropriate, "one doesn't have to be unpleasant and whine all the time/man behöver inte vara otrevlig och gnälla hela tiden" (line 26). It is the explicit normative orientation toward inappropriateness of continuous whining that concludes this multiparty instructional encounter:

The situation (**Figures 1, 2**) demonstrates that in a group setting, where many children are present (as agentive embodied subjects with their own emotional and corporeal experiences, perspectives and preferences), it is children's sensorial and emotional experiences and expressions that become targets for socializing instructions that foreground the collective normative


expectations. Unsurprisingly, in the collective of many children, the possibilities to be able to follow individual preferences and express subjective emotional evaluation of the situation (e.g., corporeal experiences) are constrained. During the entire situation, the teacher gives precedence to instruct the specific child, and the group of children on a general level, grounding this socialization project in the specific problematic situation.

#### A Co-constructed Framework for Narrative Tellings in Conflicts

The children's negative emotion displays – annoyance, distress, or sadness – occurred during peer (play) conflicts (c.f. Kvist, 2018) and were recurrently attended to by the teachers who invoked investigatory communicative genres: they engaged the individual children into narrative tellings about their version of the precipitating events. Such tellings presented the children's individual perspectives and emotional stances toward problematic events, but they were in many cases interactionally steered and orchestrated by the teachers (Cekaite, in press a). The teachers adopted and/or were assigned the moral position to evaluate and to lead the children's tellings, and then mediate in and resolve the conflict (attend to children's emotional expressions, instantiate general norms of conduct, while resolving the specific conflict situation as well). The communicative genre of telling multiple perspectives was oriented to by both teachers and children alike, and the children themselves draw on the genres of moral responsibility.

In **Figures 3, 4**, three boys (Andy, Edwin, and Carl, 4.5 years old) play with building blocks (the teacher is in an adjacent room). Edwin and Carl, with whiney and annoyed voices, accuse Andy of destroying their play. The children's conflict – collective accusations and blame denial – continues for some time, and it is colored by several children's displays of negative affect (lines 1–7).

During the boys' accusations (lines 01–06), the teacher appears in the doorway (lines 07–08) but she does not address the children. Nevertheless, after just a few seconds, Andy addresses the teacher and reports to her Edwin's accusation (line 09). He seems to take the teacher's presence as a request for information or a possibility to report his version of the peer problem. The teacher then crouches next to Andy and now it is the opposing party, Edwin, who articulates his own version of what has happened (line 11). He admits to having accused Andy of destroying the play, but he adds an account that provides a rationale for his accusation: Andy has allegedly taken "really many pieces and pushed/jättemånga bitar å knuffa" (line 11). Andy's and Edwin's way of both telling their respective side of the problematic situation to the teacher without the teacher's prompt demonstrates a routine way of conflict resolution in Swedish preschool; the teacher is positioned as a moral authority responsible for resolving and mediating in children's conflicts, and the children articulate their version of events.

The children's own individual versions of events are pursued further by the teacher, who asks Edwin a follow-up question: "and that wasn't how you played/å leken var inte så eller" (line 12) (she refers to Edwin's claim that Andy has taken many pieces and pushed). The next step in the investigation concerns the teacher's leading it toward the issues of responsibility and blame, causally linked to intentionality and prior knowledge. The teacher addresses what becomes the central point of their talk: did Andy know how play was supposed to be (line 14).

As demonstrated, the teacher leads the children's interactional moves through questions, reasoning, and negotiation, thereby facilitating the children's tellings in relation to the normative expectations of the classroom, and provides simultaneously positive support. Carl's statement about Andy's intentional misconduct is rejected by the teacher who wants to hear Edwin's version. Upon Edwin's response that he does not know (line 18), the teacher shifts from investigation and focus on hearing and letting the children narrate their individual perspectives, to a socializing instruction that attends to general and future-oriented features of appropriate conduct.

#### Teachers' Design of Instruction to Address Multiple Temporal Horizons

Following the teacher's investigation of the children's conflict situation and their negative stances, various solutions were proposed. Notably, solving current problems in the peer group involved not only orientation toward the specific situation but also the teacher, in a typical socializing instruction, reached out to the future, where similar situations could occur. In this way, the children's individual perspectives were transformed and re-interpreted within the light of common norms of appropriate conduct that served as a ground for modeling the children's conduct and language use in the future. A problem in the present temporal horizon was used to provide specific pedagogic guidelines on how children should solve similar problems in hypothetical future situations. Importantly, handling this conflict situation in the present also necessitated the teacher to secure the children's here-and-now adherence to normatively appropriate actions and their participation in institutional activities.

The teacher instructs the children about how to act in a similar hypothetical play situation: based on the children's versions, she formulates a conclusive non-negotiable statement and deflects Andy's blame by explaining the causal link between knowledge, intentionality, and moral responsibility (line 19). The teacher does not explicitly attend to, correct, or affirm, the children's negative emotional displays (the boys' irritation and accusations of Andy, or Andy's distress), although implicitly she does not approve of the reason for their accusations and negative emotional stances. Instead, the teacher instructs the children by invoking a hypothetical situation concerning how the boys can act and talk in a similar situation in the future "what can one say then 'we play like this' (0.3) that one shouldn't move the blocks/vad kan man säga då 'vi leker sähär' (0.3) att man inte ska flytta klossarna" (lines 23–24). She enacts what one could or should say by using a generic description "we play *like this*" (line 23) and ties it to the current problematic play: "that one shouldn't move the blocks/att man inte ska flytta klossarna/" (lines 23–24). The teacher also adds an explanation that puts the proposed line of action into a positive evaluative perspective toward the norm of inclusiveness in the peer group "it's better to say like that so one can take part/ det är bättre så att man kan få va med" (line 24). The teacher uses the style of reasoning that, rather than imposing a


hierarchical normative rule, works in a persuasive mode that includes reasons and also highlights positive evaluation and advantages for individuals, or for common good.

The teacher then orients to Andy (who is now sitting turned away from the boys) and uses a softer voice (lines 25–27), explaining the specific actions that have caused the initial play conflict and the boys' implicated negative emotion: "do you understand Andy they don't want the blocks to be moved/ förstår du Andy dom vill inte att klossarna skulle flyttas" (line 25). Explanatory mode in handling the children's negative emotional stances and conflict is used in the teacher's explicit articulation of the causal links between the boys' actions and conflict, and the children's volition and individual perspectives are made explicit. Here, an overlap between the multiple prevailing temporal horizons – past, future, and present – becomes apparent as the teacher addresses and explains Andy how he can play now, a solution that does not involve Andy conforming with the rules of the play and joining the other children. As the teacher handles the current problematic situation, one of the tasks for her is to reintroduce the child hereand-now into the institutional activity, and the perspectives of an individual and collective norms are renegotiated (lines 25–27).

#### Persuasive Explanatory Talk and Non-negotiable Social Rules

The children's negative emotional stances (marking their conflictual actions) during peer activities were also managed by the teachers through invoking and articulating institutional non-negotiable norms (for instance, the principle of fairness, inclusiveness, and sharedness of toys and objects) in the case of a specific conflict. Invocation of such norms was usually associated with the teachers' solution of the conflict that did not leave the children many opportunities to renegotiate the norm according to their own benefit (individual children's wishes and standpoints regarding the specificities of the conflict). However, the teachers' general normative orientation did not prevent the young children from pursuing or arguing their individual cases (e.g., their desires) with negatively valorized emotional stances. Responsive to that, the teachers employed a range of persuasive argumentative interactional moves that in various ways spelled out for the disappointed child the institutional rationale and in such ways socialized the children to compliance with the demands of existing social norms, as well as societal and institutional ideologies.

In **Figures 5, 6**, Hilma (3 years old) and Nick (3 years old) play with wooden bricks and start arguing about their possessions. Hilma has several times complained about the distribution of bricks with a whiney and annoyed voice. The teacher intervenes in the conflict by asking Hilma and Nick what is wrong (soliciting the children's individual perspectives, c.f. **Figure 3**). However, she soon moves on to solve their problem. The problem resolution outlines potential and preferable course of action for the children on the basis of the general institutional norm of fairness, i.e., that toys should be shared or distributed equally.

The teacher does not proceed with the investigation about what has happened (c.f. **Figure 3**). Instead, she provides a suggestion for how to solve the problem (implicitly referring to the preschool norm of inclusiveness and fairness): Nick and Hilma should play with the bricks together (line 03). Hilma, however, with a whiney voice, continues to complain, and accuses Nick of taking her bricks (lines 04, 08, and 09). These complaints are not investigated or attended to by the teacher who persistently suggests a general solution – children should and can play together (lines 05–07). As mentioned earlier, the teacher presents a number of reiterative suggestions of how to play in ways that adhere to the same norm of sharing and inclusiveness in the preschool: the teacher shifts between suggesting that Nick and Hilma should play together


and demonstrating the equal number of bricks that are available to each child. For instance, the teacher exemplifies the norm by counting the bricks aloud (Nick and Hilma have the same number of bricks, that is considered to be the fair way of dividing toys). Hilma, however, does not comply and with a whiney tone of voice she repeatedly states that she

wants to have more than four bricks (lines 13, 15, and 16). Instead of addressing Hilma's viewpoint or her negative emotional stance, the teacher retains the norm of sharing fairly (lines 11, 12, 14, and 17). In doing so, she implicitly rejects Hilma's individual emotional-volition perspective: the children's individual desires and wishes have to be modified in the light of the institutional moral order of social solidarity.

#### Moral Implications of Children's Negative Emotional Expressions: Differences in Whiny and Upset Emotional Stances

In preschool teacher-child interactions, the children's negative emotional stances were interpreted and evaluated as relevant, morally appropriate or not, with a focus on the type of emotion and their action referent in the particular social situation. Whereas the institutional norms were usually an important non-negotiable guideline for social control according to which children's individual desires were implicitly or explicitly socialized by the teachers in order to foster the subservience to the normative expectations of the community, the child's individual emotion-volition acts could gain weight, albeit not easily. This could happen in situations when the children displayed continuous upset and excluded themselves from the participation in the preschool activities. Such disharmony disturbed the balance between the smooth flow of preschool activities and the children's satisfaction, invoking the teachers' responsibility to support of the child's emotional well-being and sustain emotional relatedness between the teacher and the child. Institutional norms were thus intimately linked to the type of children's emotional expressions and the teachers' institutional responsibilities. There were various sets of norms related to children's expressions of sadness and distress, compared to stances displaying whininess and irritation.

In **Figure 6** (continuation of **Figure 5**), Hilma keeps complaining in a whiney tone of voice. This time she explicitly refers to her individual desires ("but I don't want to have/ men jag vill inte ha," line 18). The teacher addresses Hilma's complaints and for the first time enquires about her individual perspective.

When Hilma whiningly claims that she does not want to have so few (bricks) (line 20), the teacher, with a decisive, disciplining voice, explains that there are no more bricks available (yet again, she does not give in to Hilma's individual desires that digress from the institutional norms of sharing). About 10 s of similar interactional moves follow (omitted in transcript). Through her voice, the teacher clearly indicates her irritated stance toward the child's persistent claims of individual desires, and she makes an explanatory blame ascription "otherwise you will get one more than Nick gets then it's not fair/annars får ju du en mer än va Nick får då blir det ju orättvist" (line 23) that explicates the normative fallacy in transgressing the norm of fairness. At this point, the teacher assertively terminates her discussion with Hilma and she starts playing with Nick and other children. Hilma, however, does not re-engage in play: she sits alone, and her sad facial expression and bodily posture signal that she is upset and she is silently crying (1 min and 20 s omitted).

As the child in distress excludes herself from social interaction, the teacher re-establishes her conversation with Hilma by using a comforting, softer tone, and by inviting Hilma to sit on her lap (lines 24–25). The teacher uses common soothing practices and touch embrace (Cekaite and Kvist, 2017) as a corporeal hub of intimacy and compassion. Notably, while she validates the child's negative emotional expression through intimate comforting acts (by embracing her and putting her cheek next to Hilma's cheek while drying her tears), she still sustains the normative orientation of the educational institution: in a very soft voice she explains the rules of the preschool where the children need to take turns and share the toys when they play together (lines 30–33). The way the teacher responds to Hilma's claims of individual desire and her concurrent emotional stances (c.f. Hilma's whiny stance in 18, 20, and 22; **Figure 5**) differs primarily in the affective valorization of the teacher's talk. This time she renders a detailed and long explanation of how the children have to act if they play together: "then one has to shared/då får man samsas" (line 26). Unsurprisingly, playing together requires downgrading one's own desires and perspectives and even if children wish to play on their own, one has to curb and restrain one's desires, at least temporarily (lines 28–29).

However, the problem – Hilma's desire to have more bricks and her negative emotional stance of upset – has not changed and finally, the teacher suspends the norm of sharing: she asks Nick to lend Hilma a toy he is using. Notably, such digression from the institutional norm is not easy and requires the teacher to interactionally engage in moral relational work toward the group of children: the teacher's reason-giving involves her appeal to Nick's empathy because "Hilma got a bit sad/ Hilma blev lite ledsen" rather than a principle of fairness (line 32). As demonstrated, the child's shift in emotional stance – from whiney and annoyed to extended upset and self-exclusion – seems to invoke a new moral order that changes the course of the play activity and gives the child access to the desired object *via* the teacher. Institutional norms and institutional morality (collective vs. individual) are susceptible to attend to the emotional states of the children – whiney or upset – but are not suspended easily.

# DISCUSSION

The present study has examined how teachers in a Swedish preschool responded to children's negative emotional stances. By engaging in detailed interaction analyses (Goodwin, 2018), we have explored the practices in which emotion and moral norms were co-constructed through embodied social interaction between teachers and children. We have conceptualized these processes as communicatively realized socialization (and regulation) of children's negative emotions. As demonstrated, in teacher-child encounters, children's negative emotional stances (embodied and verbal social acts) were evaluated in terms of relevance and normative appropriateness. Based on the type of emotions expressed, a particular communicative genre was deployed to resolve the social situation. Notably, the study did not aim to document the developmental outcomes. Rather, by taking into account the social-ecological conditions of the preschool as a collective institutional setting with multiple – educational and social – goals, we have examined and highlighted the typical variety of teachers' socializing instructional responses toward children's actions that were colored by their negative emotional stances.

As demonstrated, the teachers' socializing instructional work was conducted in different ways that were intertwined with a number of social-relational and institutional concerns. The teachers used both explicit and implicit socializing strategies (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2012). Implicitly, they modeled and responded with their own emotional stances toward the children (Denham et al., 2012), and through disciplining or comforting stances, rejected (**Figures 1, 5**) or validated (**Figures 4, 6**) the children's negative stances and actions. Explicit discursive instructions about emotions *per se* (so called "emotion narrativity," language labels identifying specific emotions, see Ahn, 2010 on an American middle-class preschool; Thompson, 2015, on parental conversations about negative emotions as strategies for emotion regulation) were not notably present in the data. Rather, explicit socialization strategies dealt with the normative aspects of the children's conduct, and the explication of social rules. Here, it is notable that emotional stances were inextricably linked to social actions, and the teachers' normative evaluation immersed the children into the lived experiences that acting and feeling were intertwined within concrete courses of actions. Teacher responses to children's emotion-linked actions, rather than explicit emotion instructions and the use of emotion labels, characterized the preschool setting.

#### Communicative Genres of Preschool Emotion Socialization

#### General and Individual Perspectives

Our study shows that preschool, as a collective institutional environment, presents a specific social environment with its own characteristic communicative genres of children's emotional and moral accountability. More specifically, preschool teachers recurrently used a communicative genre where general moral and emotional principles were prioritized over detailed explications of individual children's emotional-volitional perspectives and specific conduct. A prevailing characteristic of the preschool teachers' instructive socializing activities was the continuous shift between general pedagogic (emotional) discourse (that transcended the current situation and was at times formulated as hypothetical situations, see Evaldsson and Melander, 2017), and specific instructions targeting the children's conduct and (emotional) experiences in a current situation. Specific emotions and current conflict situations were used as points of departure and opportunities to engage in wide-ranging instructions that extended beyond the current situation. In other words, an individual child's emotional experience or conduct was usually not investigated in any detail, but used as a starting point to articulate social norms of the preschool. They were incorporated as examples in communicative projects that aimed to be instructive to the larger group of children (**Figures 1, 3, 4**). For instance, the recurrent communicative genres of investigating and hearing multiple individual perspectives in conflict situations, where children were encouraged to articulate their own version (and were exposed to different perspectives) on a problematic event (**Figures 3–5**) allowed the teachers to avoid conflict and refrain from open social control (e.g., Cekaite, 2013, in press a; Kvist, 2018, on similar practices documented in other types of educational settings). At the same time, the children's tellings were guided by the institutional perspective through the teachers' leading questions (see contrasting studies by Burdelski, 2010; Ahn, 2016).

#### Non-negotiability of Norms and Teachers' Persuasive Explanatory Strategies

The present study, conducted in a Swedish preschool, shows that the teachers used different communicative genres, compared to Swedish family parent-child interactions (Demuth, 2013; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018 on mothers' responses to infants' negative emotions). In families, negotiations and covert parental control were present, and parents confirmed and validated children's (emotional) autonomy. A communicative style that draws on non-negotiability of norms (e.g., general rules of the preschool related to fairness, inclusiveness, non-negotiability of "property" rights) was prevalent. It gave minimal opportunities for the children's success in renegotiation and also for emphasis on their individual preferences, desires and emotional stances (**Figure 5**). It is notable that compliance with the norms of the preschool was expected and that numerous persuasive explanatory strategies were used in order to achieve the child's compliance (**Figures 5, 6**). The teachers took on the responsibility to interpret and assign the children's negative emotion stances a normative value, and thereby to confirm or reject their relevance (**Figures 1, 4–6**). This was done either by disciplining or, in contrast, validating children's actions and emotion displays. Notably, while the ways people experience and feel in a specific situation are often considered to be subjective and something that varies between individuals, the teachers were able to take a position as an authority who could evaluate, confirm or disregard the children's individual experiences (**Figures 1, 2**). Institutional norms were usually presented as non-negotiable guideline for social actions and they simultaneously served as interactionally situated guidelines according to which children's individual wishes and aspirations were socialized by the teachers (see also Kvist, 2018 on teachers' similar responses to children's crying). Thus, life in a preschool valued certain conformity to general norms (in contrast to extensive possibilities for renegotiations documented in Swedish family interactions, Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018).

The children's individual emotion-volition acts were sometimes taken into account by the teachers in their resolution of the problematic situations in the children's peer group. This happened primarily in situations where a child displayed a continuous emotional stance of upset. There were thus specific set of norms related to children's expressions of sadness and distress, compared to their whiney or irritated stances. Institutional norms and moral frameworks were, in this sense, intimately linked to the type of emotional stances taken by children. Moreover, as preschool activities were routinely organized as multiparty interactions (including groups of children), preschool teachers were not the sole interpreters of children's emotional conduct. Peers routinely commented on and evaluated their peers' emotional expressions and conduct, and in this sense, contributed to the development of emotional discourse and moral order in the preschool.

#### Multiple Temporal Horizons

While preschool teachers gave precedence to general guidelines that were designed to be applicable in future situations, the necessity to deal with a conflict situation in the present imposed a requirement to assure that the children acted and participated appropriately in the institutional activities in the present, i.e., here-and-now. In this way, multiple prevailing temporal horizons – past, future, and present – became inherently intertwined in preschool teachers' instructional socializing actions. They show how children's emotion and moral socialization extends into the abilities to view oneself as a social persona in a temporally multi-layered, i.e., multi-scalar perspective. The teachers immersed the children into interactional practices that furthered their understanding of causal and temporal links between what the participants' (teachers or children) deemed as appropriate or inappropriate actions and emotional stances. Here, a division between general normative guidelines and specific, here-and-now, individual resolution of a problematic situation became apparent and pertinent, and the children could be experiencing somewhat divergent and ambiguous socializing messages (**Figures 4, 6**). General norms for appropriate conduct were at times disregarded in the service of a satisfactory resolution of the current (emotional) problem.

#### Limitations and Advantages of the Present Study: Emotion Socialization From Multimodal Interaction Analysis Perspective

The findings of the study can be seen in the light of some limitations, mainly related to sample size and data material, the short term of data collection as well as the use of timeconsuming inductive analytical method. The video-ethnographic data does not allow the study to be regarded as a full-scale ethnography that can provide a rich account of participants' motives and normative world views. Also, the data are based on video observations from one regular Swedish preschool and therefore it does not provide grounds for representative generalizations about the normative specificities of Swedish early childhood education as such, but discussion of results shows significant similarities to emotion socialization practices documented in other studies from Swedish educational institutions (see Cekaite, 2012b, 2013, in press a; Evaldsson and Melander, 2017; Björk-Willén, 2018; Kvist, 2018). In that the data collection did not involve a longitudinal design, we are not able to document and discuss the (factual) outcomes of the socializing instructional practices and have limited possibilities to causally link certain practices to specific learning outcomes and children's development emotional competences and emotion regulation. Moreover, the detailed interactional analytical perspective relies on inductively emergent categories and does not strive after statistically representative results, or what is commonly considered as replicable study design related to hypothesis testing.

However, viewed from a methodological perspective, the current study provides a novel insight into how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to explore communicative practices and can add to the understanding of traditional psychological topics. The social interactional approach adopted in this study focuses on social and psychological phenomena by attending to and analyzing so called emic, participants' perspectives. The use of multimodal interaction analysis highlights that emotion socialization is multifaceted: it clearly reaches beyond language use and verbal emotion labels, and is largely orchestrated through multiple semiotic means (thereby extending beyond discursive emotional labels). Some of the advantages of the present study involve the use of the particular analytical method. Examining interactions between teachers and children from the perspective of a multimodal interaction analysis has emphasized the embodied and contextual character of emotion socialization and rendered socialization as temporally unfolding multisemiotic interactive actions. Through the close examination of embodied actions of the participants, the study revealed that explicit talk about emotions and emotion scripts did not dominate the present early education setting (in contrast to the studies suggesting that verbal practices in caregiver-child conversations about emotions and moral issues enhance children's emotion regulation and moral development, see Wainryb and Recchia, 2014; Thompson, 2015). While the absence of explicit emotion talk can be seen as characteristic to the particular preschool, the current findings that emotions are primarily interpreted in terms of the appropriateness of children's social actions can suggest a relevant avenue for further exploration of how emotion socialization are conducted in embodied, multisemiotic, and social interactions.

Analysis of video data from a multimodal interaction analytical perspective, deployed in the present study, allowed us to examine how children and teachers display emotional stances by using a variety of resources, including – apart from talk – prosody, gestures, gaze, facial expressions, bodily posture, haptic formations, and spatial positioning. Emotion socialization in preschool activities is inherently multisemiotic: it targets emotion displays as embodied and situated. Analytical focus on the unfolding of emotional stances and the sequential organization of the participants' interaction, which is at the heart of multimodal interaction analysis, has highlighted and uncovered the indexical link between emotional stances and social activities. Moreover, the method used in the presented study demonstrates that emotion socialization in preschool does not only target children's conduct and their emotional expressions, but also to some extent involves children's embodied experiences – a perceptual socialization of sensorial competence (e.g., **Figures 1, 2**). The present study argues that the ways in which embodied, spatially and materially embedded social activities unfold serve as cultural resources and interactional templates for children's emotional and normative development. Detailed multimodal interactional analysis provided possibilities to discover how children were introduced into normative frameworks of sensorial understandings and were taught how to interpret their embodied sensations. We suggest that a broadened perspective, including embodied and spatial dimensions of social actions as both resources and targets for emotion socialization, as has been demonstrated here, could deepen our understanding of how a shared emotional world is constituted (Goodwin, 2018).

#### ETHICS STATEMENT

Regionala etikprövningsnämnden i Linköping, Avdelning för prövning av övrig forskning. ("Regional ethical board in Linköping, Section for probation of general research") Affiliation/ Address: Linköping University Hälsouniversitets kansli Sandbäcksgatan 7 581 83 Linköping, Sweden.

#### REFERENCES


#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

AC and AE contributed to the design of the study, the analysis of the results, and the writing of the manuscript. Authors are listed alphabetically.

## FUNDING

The research project "Communicating morality, embodying emotions" was financed by Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council), Grant 742-2013-7626; PI Asta Cekaite. Publication of the results was supported by Linköping University Library.


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Cekaite and Ekström. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity

#### *Michael Forrester\**

*School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom*

Alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted numerous ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis appear to face particular difficulties that arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices. This article considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning, an infant's earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what conversation analysts call members' methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how "what-wasonce-one" (the mother-infant unit) somehow differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the "individuated being." What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant's lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. Ultimately, this raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott's idea of the transitional space, where the "good-enough" parent is said to be somebody, who can "contain" both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified form. In this way, the infant begins to recognize/experience what it is they are "feeling." Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, given that in psychoanalytic thought, we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature.

Keywords: psychoanalytic, theory, ethnomethodology, social, sharing

#### *Edited by:*

*Carolin Demuth, Aalborg University, Denmark*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Karin Osvaldsson Cromdal, Linköping University, Sweden Carlos Kölbl, University of Bayreuth, Germany*

> *\*Correspondence: Michael Forrester m.a.forrester@kent.ac.uk*

#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 06 February 2019 Accepted: 20 August 2019 Published: 30 August 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Forrester M (2019) Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity. Front. Psychol. 10:2032. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02032*

**133**

# INTRODUCTION

Over at least last 50 years or so, since Sack's (1992) seminal lectures, there is little doubt that alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted numerous ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, conversation analysis appears to face particular challenges regarding the relations between action and emotion that may arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices found in this approach (Sorjonen and Peräkylä, 2012). As follows, the suggestion will be made that the researchers interested in the primary roots of socially shared normativity may have an unrecognized difficulty with breaking away from deeply held assumptions regarding affective or emotional dimensions of human experience, particularly the notion that these remain private or individuated (pertaining only to a specific individual's private experience). In order to help dispel or disabuse such unrecognized presuppositions, a case is made for considering new psychoanalytic approaches to affect and emotion, where one finds a socially saturated conception of what constitutes psychological life – specifically in what have become known as object-relation approaches.

The first part of the article will highlight research in conversation analysis (CA form here) that has explicated the fact that from birth, an infant's earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what are termed members' methods. Observations will then be offered that draw attention to a certain avoidance or elision regarding the domain of affect and to detailed discussion of what kind of implicit model(s) of subject-hood are oriented to by researchers in child-focused CA. Having highlighted challenges CA work faces when studying the interdependence of affect and action, the second part of the article outlines a partial summary of developmental psychoanalytic thought, specifically some of the key ideas in the object-relations school. This forms the basis for suggesting that child-focused CA may find this perspective a rich source for developing a discourse of affective-normativity.

# CHILD-FOCUSED ETHNOMETHODOLOGICALLY INFORMED CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

From the beginning, an infant's earliest experience is bound up with the practices and social actions that make up what ethnomethodology call members' methods. In the emerging child-focused conversation analytic literature, there are indications that the domain of what constitutes "talk-in-interaction" has expanded considerably. Numerous studies document and explicate the diverse range of social practices that together form the rich nexus of multi-modal events that together form the acculturation frame for the infant and young child. We find representative examples of recent work for instance on touch, embodiment, crying, laughter, whining, pleasure, and affect (Wiggins, 2002; Laurier and Wiggins, 2011; Fantasia et al., 2014, 2015a,b; Cekaite, 2015; Jenkins and Hepburn, 2015; Berducci, 2016; Walker, 2017; Butler and Edwards, 2018). This research seems to indicate that in child-focused conversation analysis (CA from here), the boundaries of what would normally come under the umbrella term "talk-in-interaction" continue to expand. However, there may be a slight ambiguity or unrecognized difficulty with such expansion as it seems to indicate a move away from the methodological foundation stone (or lodestone) of reflexive accountability. Consider the following comment from Livingston (1987) that highlights the all-pervasive nature of the ethnomethodologically informed CA project:

What the common person knows or does not know is not at issue. Instead, the central issue and the central research problem is the examination of the unwitting, without extrinsic motivation, production of the ordinary social object. …[it is a] massive domain of phenomena the domain of practical action and practical reasoning. It is this omnipresent domain of **practical methods**, *through which* and wherein people **make of the things they are doing** the **things that they accountably are**, that the ethnomethodologist seeks to investigate. By examining those methods in the material detail of their alwaysidiosyncratic embodiments, the ethnomethodologist seeks to understand those methods in and as that same, endlessly diversified, identifying specificity. (p. 12 – emphasis in original)

In effect, *all* social practices are open to analysis, including the practices and procedures of scientists, social researchers, and conversation analysts themselves. A couple of things are noticeable about this programmatic statement. First, there is the elision or avoidance of terms and concepts that presuppose knowledge, mental states (and one would surmise, emotion and affect), and anything that might be said to be "inside" or private to the individual. While this reflects the healthy skepticism CA and discursive psychology exhibit toward the logocentric excesses of traditional psychology (Coulter, 1999; Edwards and Potter, 2005), we can ask whether such elision may raise difficulties for understanding affective dimensions of talk-in-interaction. As Sorjonen and Peräkylä (2012) put it, "we do not yet have a satisfactory understanding of the relation between action and emotion." (p. 9).

Second, methodic practice is both omnipresent and at the same time, evidenced through procedures of reflexive accountability, a competency that an infant or young child is unlikely to possess and which thus positions her in a kind of ethnomethodological limbo. The classic CA position regarding membership of a culture is that it is something that is gradually attained, in the sense that a child has to learn those performances and practices that constitute "doing" membership appropriately (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). However, as Shakespeare (1998) argues, because children are not effectively full members, the child's role in interaction is constructed in terms of them building toward becoming a competent person, where much of their experience is replete with examples from adults concerning how to achieve full membership. Do infants and young children learn how to display affect and emotion from adults – simply as a set of actions or stances? Or do we assume that (spontaneous, innate) emotion states are molded by adults such that display reflects cultural dimensions of normativity? Questions of this nature seem to indicate a role for developing a discourse of affective-normativity.

Becoming a full member then presupposes possessing the skills and competencies that surround whatever it is taken as the appropriate performance or display of emotion. Sorjonen and Peräkylä (2012) suggest that perhaps the closest relation between emotion and action (methodic practice) is to be found in "displays of emotion that, at least in some context, can be considered as action" (p. 9). If we think about the areas where expressions of affect are being studied (such as crying, whining, complaining, and laughing), it seems that child focused CA is moving closer to a position where affect and emotion is conceptually associated with normativity. Whatever we understand by the terms affect and emotion, the question remains whether this is something – a dimension or domain – that remains unique (private) to the individual, or instead part of those members methods (social practices) that ultimately depend on learning what counts as appropriate performance.

Some discussion regarding normative dimensions or domains of affect seems important given the emergence of infant and child-focused CA work. Recent research documenting and describing the subtle and delicate nature of multi-modal social practices underpinning early parent-child talk-in-interaction is drawing attention to the social-semiotic embodied dimensions of affective-normativity (e.g., Cekaite, 2016; Kern, 2018; Holm Kvist, 2018). From the outset, whatever we are calling the infant's "experience" or consciousness is interdependent with the specific social and cultural practices surrounding birth, childhood, dependency, mothering, asymmetry – i.e., whatever makes up the matrix of social practices surrounding the infant. However, even to use a term such as "surrounding" immediately draws attention to difficulties regarding what is presupposed by categories and constructs such as personhood, individuality, separation, subject, and object, and in fact, all those terms and associations brought into play when we seek to understand what makes for a socially shared normativity. One can imagine that a CA perspective on what an affect-focused socially shared normativity would constitute, would be one where whatever we understand as mutual engagement, is something where the mutuality being displayed is viewed as evidence that there exists (and is in play) a normative system oriented to by the participants who are involved in "doing engagement" or joint participation. However, can one successfully "perform" doingbeing-emotionally engaged, such that said performance is open to scrutiny and reflexive accountability? Part of the difficulty surrounding thinking about affective dimensions of normativity (i.e., those conventions and practices associated with the display and performance of emotion) may be linked to the empirical requirements of CA, particularly that analytic interpretation should rest upon identifiable participant-oriented evidence in talk-in-interaction itself. Such a requirement may engender an avoidance for developing a theoretically informed discourse or set of descriptions for what constitutes affect or emotion.

Recent work in CA highlights the various interdependencies between sequential organization and the display of emotion or participant's "emotional stance" (Goodwin, 2007; Stivers, 2008; Voutilainen et al., 2014), and understandably this line of work exhibits a pervasive focus on the performance details of the fine-grained orderliness, in what one might call an example of methodological "affect avoidance." Maynard and Freese (2012), for example, in a subtle and detailed analysis, draw out the significance of intonation during the on-going production and reception of good and bad news, making the point that their approach,

Shares the constructionist commitment to studying display of emotion in interaction and *remaining agnostic about the existence* of internal accompaniments to such displays. (p. 94). [emphasis added]

What is interesting here is that this agnosticism nevertheless presupposes a possible backdrop of internal emotional states – which remains beyond discussion (for empirical reasons). Similarly, for Goodwin and Goodwin (2000) emotion is a social phenomenon that is made visible or constructed in and through the systemic practices lodged within the processes of situated action, "used by participants to build in concert with each other the events that make up their life world" (p. 569). What does warrant comment is the difficulty that CA and related discursive approaches appear to have regarding terms such as affect and emotion.

Building on work in philosophy, aesthetics and critical theory (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) a number of writers emphasize a recent *affective turn*, characterized as a movement toward understanding domains of experience outside of the dominant paradigm of representation (Clough and Halley, 2007). In a recent special issue on affect and subjectivity, Lara et al. (2017) make the point that the "missing subject" is one of the predominant critiques of the turn to affect, where there is "considerable unease about what a vacated subject meant for questions of power and agency." (p. 32).

Examining these developments, Wetherell (2013) describes the aim of affect theory [an approach that emphasize processes, *beyond*, *below,* and *past* discourse, (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008)], as a perspective that aims to "deliver the tools required for lively, textured research on embodied social action and for productive insights into the entangled forms of assembling constituting social life moment to moment." (p. 351). Describing example views of affect theory, Wetherell (2013) comments on Massumi's (2002) *affect as excess* viewpoint, where:

"He [Massumi] maintains that affect is thus a kind of intensity, making a difference below the threshold of consciousness, thrusting the subject into particular kinds of relations with the material, and social world… [and]…discourse works on a different track from affect – a 'quality' track as opposed to the 'intensity' track. The quality track leads to naming, and to the framing of affect in conventional discursive, linguistic and cultural terms. If affect is a kind of chaotic excess and the unprocessed push, then the moment of discursive representation is bureaucratic and organizational. For Massumi, it is the process by which potentially 'wild' affect is tamed, turned into something people can recognize, talk about to each other and communicate as 'domesticated' emotion." (p. 354).

Attempting to build a productive dialogue between traditions in discourse studies (e.g., CA) and new lines of research in affect and emotion, Wetherell (2013) examines a sequence from Goodwin's (2006) work on children's playground games, noting that Goodwin seeks to explore affect and discourse equally, assuming that, "these are entangled in the sense that embodied action (on a scale of intensity) tends to be bound up with talk at some point in a flow of activity" (p. 360). Her analysis concludes that research such as Goodwin's (2006) moves beyond a simple binary divide of "affect vs. discourse" given that this work,

effectively conveys the feel and patterning of bodies in action, the lively flow of social life and sticks closely to participants' perspectives…(and)…it puts both affect and discourse back where they should be within emergent patterns of situated activity, and makes the patterns, as they need to be, the main research focus. (Wetherell, 2013, p. 364).

Certainly, there is little doubt that the Goodwin's have been significant in developing the notion of affective stance loosely defined as "a positioning accomplished through conduct and thereby made publicly accessible" (Sorjonen and Peräkylä, 2012, p. 5). Whatever affects are within CA, they can be utilized as resources – something that people in talk-in-interaction can draw on. Following their helpful explication of bodily compliance by children Goodwin et al. (2012) argue that alongside the traditional study of facial expression and the psychology of emotion, research should consider,

the relevant actions and bodily displays of the parties they are interacting with. We argue specifically that the body of the party producing an emotional display cannot be examined in isolation. Crucial to the organization of emotion as public practice is the way in which individuals display rapidly changing stances toward both other participants, and the actions currently in progress. (p. 39–40)

For Goodwin et al. (2012), affective stance and emotion are not "add-ons" but "constitute central components of the situated actions participants build to carry out the mundane activities that make up the lived social world they inhabit together." (p. 40).

Interestingly, such comments are not so far removed from those emotion theorists in developmental psychology who 20 years ago, and coming from the opposite direction, called for a move away from a focus on the unifying role of a "central feeling state" toward a realization of what the child is doing to adapt his or her goals to the environment, and to modify the environment to fits said goals (Campos et al., 1989). Described as "emotion regulation," displays of affect involved, "regulating the action tendencies of the other facilitating action tendencies when desirable, redirecting them when necessary, or preventing them when culture or danger dictates" (Campos et al., 1989, p. 397). While understanding, what does seem clear is that in CA theoretical elaboration regarding discourses of affect and emotion tends either to be avoided or deemed unnecessary, given that whatever it might be, it is reducible to social praxis – will always remain an empirical question linked to requirements of participantorientation and the display of methodic practice. This suggestion here is that such a constraint may be unhelpful when considerations turn to theoretical underpinnings of socially shared normativity.

Before moving to the main focus of this article, certain psychoanalytic perspectives on affect and emotion (with regard to discourse, methodic practice, and normativity), some comments are warranted regarding conceptions of the infant/child's mind we find in CA. Understandably, given the work that CA and discursive psychology have done so as to provide and alternative view to that found in traditional developmental psychology (Leslie, 1987; Perner, 1992) commentators are certainly suspicious or circumspect about presupposing a foundational or causal significance to "internal" development (e.g., cognitive development, emotional maturation, neurobiological change and so on). In their critique of the overemphasis on "theory of mind" and its relation to cognitive competence in developmental psychology, Lerner et al. (2011) make the point that cognitive representational conceptions of underlying skills should conform to, "the actual requirements of the observable interaction order and participant in it – for example, the structurally afforded ability to recognize, project, and contingently employ unfolding structures of action in interaction with others." (p. 45). For CA whatever cognitive capacities are found to underwrite interactional order, the specification of the relevant elements of this domain requires a close and systematic analysis of naturally occurring interaction addressed to the manifold contingencies of everyday life, and the social-sequential structures that enable human interaction. Lerner et al. (2011) comment;

It seems to us that very young children only require the *in situ practiced capacities required* to recognize, in each particular case, the formal structures of the in-progress actions that recurrently fill their social interactional world and the practical skills to participate in each context-specific realizations of those structures of action as they are progressively realized, and as each next element in its progressive realization, projects a next constituent of that structure. (p. 57).

What underscores CA child-focused analysis, is that while there may be some recognition that social interaction may in part depend on evolved neural mechanisms of (an individual's) brain, there is no defensible basis for the presupposition that the skills and competencies employed derive from cognitive representational entities in the mind. For Lerner et al. (2011) the young child's abilities are to be understood as akin to affordance-like capacities intimately connected with detecting patterns in the ongoing sequence of actions and events made available to them through talk-in-interaction.

Similarly, in recent work by Keel (2015), when summarizing pre-school children's skills and competencies when building up a normative position of the surrounding world, comments;

my detailed study of how children deploy assessments to achieve self-praise, noticings, announcements, complaints, or requests displays their orientation toward participants' membership categories, the responsibilities and rights that are bound to them, and the larger praxeological context, adapting their way of packaging their initial assessment and mobilizing different sequential, formal, linguistic and embodied resources accordingly. (p. 218).

The picture of the child's mind here is of an entity who can "package assessments" and adapt them to circumstances, and mobilize resources of various kinds. The entity is certainly constructivist but further commentary on what constitutes the "being-who-is-constructing" is avoided or evaded. A similarly cautious or circumspect perspective can be seen in the earlier work of Wootton (1997) when discussing children's emerging competences underpinning their capacity to use local and public understanding(s):

Around that time (aged two years old) the child develops the skill to identify and draw on local knowledge which has been made apparent within prior interaction. Because this knowledge is contingent and local I have chosen to use the term "understanding" to describe it rather than a term like "representation," the latter indexing forms of knowledge which have a more enduring status within the mind. (Wootton, 1997, 192–193).

Notice that understandings are something that are now public and accountable – social objects produced and reproduced in the ongoing dynamics of interaction. However, the idea or notion of the child's mind (as nevertheless existing and being something separate from that which is experience) remains in the background in CA. Beyond the assumptions that this agent is a learning being who accrues the skills and abilities to employ available resources (e.g., the competencies *to draw on local knowledge*), discussion regarding emotion or affect seems to be something to be avoided.

There are then a number of challenges that CA faces when seeking to understand the relationship between action and affect/emotion, particularly for child-focused research. The members method criteria underpinning membership status (e.g., reflexive accountability) seems to be glossed over once the detail of adult-child engagement and participation begins to be examined (Forrester and Reason, 2006; Filipi, 2009). In addition, while considered and important insights have come from research on affective stance, such insights still seem to rest on the possible existence of person-experience affect/emotion state(s). There remains an understandable reluctance to discuss or develop a conceptual framework or discourse regarding affect. Parallels to such avoidance or elision can be found in the guardedness or skepticism regarding cognitive dimensions of the developing child in early child-focused CA work. Although such caution has helped counter the excessive formalisms of the dominant and traditional approaches in disciplines such as developmental psychology (e.g., Leslie, 1987; Perner, 1992); this seems to have left a vacuum or absence when it comes to trying to think through what a discourse of affectivenormativity might look like. Psychoanalytic approaches may offer some helpful suggestions in this regard, as other critical theorists have pointed out (Frosch, 2003; Hollway, 2011).

# OBJECT-RELATIONS PERSPECTIVES ON AFFECT

We can begin by noting that the psychoanalytic developmental account of the emergence of emotion or affect comes from a perspective that is not only at odds with CA accounts but is somewhat different from the dominant views found in developmental psychology. In psychoanalytic thinking, the forces at play in the mind are dynamic and unceasing and motivated by primitive and ultimately biologically oriented forces of energy, both positive and negative (traditionally termed "instincts"). The objects and entities said to make up the unconscious are a motley collection of undesirable, and unrealizable/ incomprehensible elements, some constitutional others acquired and constantly seeking to undermine whatever we understand as the coherence of the ego. This is a view of mind where the human (adult, child, or infant) is a being who possesses certain attributes and characteristics of mind that forever seek to undercut whatever notions one has of possessing a stable mind (conscious-self) entity. Leaving aside the long-discussed issues surrounding methodology and empirical support1 , this perspective certainly stands in stark contrast to the perspective found in CA or in contemporary developmental psychology.

One particularly different and noticeable aspect about the psychoanalytic view of the developing child is the idea that from the beginning the issue of separateness and "self-identity" is called into question – this is the significance of the Freudian legacy of the later 19th century. Rather than just assuming there is a sense of separateness accompanying the infant's experience of the earliest moments of life, the psychoanalytic view asks under what conditions are we to understand how an infant "attains" or moves to the position of experiencing "separateness" or "individuation" in the first place? Psychoanalytic thought requires or demands a critical examination of any

<sup>1</sup> The question of methodology and what counts as defensible empirical support across EM/CA, developmental psychology, and psychoanalytic research rests on the specifics of each research tradition – i.e., concerns will reflect prevailing criteria regarding appropriateness, defensibility, and correctness within each approach. Methodological observations regarding contrasts and comparisons are beyond the scope or focus of this paper.

assumptions and presuppositions surrounding awareness, self, or whatever we might want to call consciousness of separateness. Theoretically developed accounts of the developing self are to be found in the object-relations view of Klein (1949, 1957) and Winnicott (1960, 1974), and in recent psychosocial approaches (e.g., Stern, 1985; Hollway, 2006; Walkerdine, 2014).

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, for example, consistently emphasized the role of affective states said to be (constituted) by movement between states of ego disintegration and partial integration of "self-awareness." In this account to "exist" as an infant at all is to some extent an achievement. To paraphrase Green (1999), Winnicott's unique contribution was to show that at the beginning the notion of a separate baby is incoherent, and that,

it is necessary to include the mother in the indissoluble couple that they form. *That is to say, no discourse on the affect can be sustained that does not take account of the mother's affects*, her tolerance of the child's regressive needs, even of a state of informal chaos, the necessary conditions for the establishment of a kernel of vital affective continuity (emphasis in the original, p. 77).

Psychoanalysts such as Green (1999) draw attention to the constraining representation-affect opposition prevalent in psychology and philosophy and instead seek to confront the affective basis of the sense of existence, as well as encouraging the development of an affect discourse. Possibly one of the difficulties we encounter when addressing affect and emotion is the pervasive or all-encompassing (and yet elusive) nature of what it is we are trying to get at, or to quote Green (1999) again,

that the essence of affect is its dynamic attribute, its capacity to seep into other domains and inhabit them and finally to transform both itself and products of the area of the mind that it has occupied. (p. 285).

Part of the problem when thinking through what might constitute an affective-normative dimension to social life is the possibility that such a dimension undercuts or rather permeates all aspects of life. For now, let us continue the psychoanalytic narrative regarding beginnings and the emergence of early psychic life for the infant.

Building on Freud's concept of instinct, the "object" of object-relations theory is anything that is employed by the instinct(s) in order to achieve its aim, Klein (1963) describes in detail how the child moves through different stages of psychic development, starting from an initial biologically determined state where both "life" and "death" instincts are in play. From the beginning the dangers, challenges, and opportunities engendered by these contrasting instinctual forces leads to a psychic splitting or differentiation of "good" and "bad" objects:

Even the child who has a loving relation with his mother has also unconsciously a terror of being devoured, torn up, and destroyed by her. (Klein, 1963, p. 277)

The model of the early mind is of a fragile ego that is sensitive to processes of dissociation and fragmentation – fragmentation due of the piecemeal way in which the world is "introjected," and dissociative because there is the ever-present inherent (internal) danger expressed as anxiety (i.e., determined by the death instinct). Working on the assumption that the human organism is likely to come into the world with a rudimentary ability to sense danger, Klein associated life's first experiences of anxiety not with acquired or learnt mental abilities, but with an internal registering of unconscious tendencies that Freud had termed the death instinct. In other words, survival meant that the baby was born knowing about death and sensing her internal destructive instincts, and this first knowledge took the form of a primordial terror or annihilation. Anxiety is thus basic to all living states, however immature, and it is this underpinning sense of danger and potential disintegration that gives rise to a spontaneous splitting. At this point is should be emphasized that this discussion focused on the earliest moments of infancy and young childhood – approximately the first year of life (leaving aside later the complications and challenges of sibling and peer socialization).

In a related commentary on the intersubjective approach to the self that originated in object relations theory, Hollway (2006) highlights the dynamic dimension of the unconscious, noting,

At a time before the infant can experience any self boundaries, these are provided by the mother…[and]… Bion (1967) saw this in terms of the container (mother) and contained (infant). Projective identification for him is a form on unconscious communication which enables a receptive mother to experience the feelings of her baby, transform them by using her mind, and through her body and emotional state communicate these modified, hopefully detoxified, feelings back to the infant, who can feel them to be bearable. The infant in this way borrows the mother's mind, which only gradually becomes internalized to the point where it is the baby's own resource. (p. 475).

Building on Klein's ideas, Winnicott (1974) coined the wellknown phrase the "good-enough" mother, said to be somebody who can "contain" both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but which are now in modified from. The point worth emphasizing here is that such maternal or paternal projective identifications should be understood as part and parcel of ongoing unconscious relational dynamics. Hollway (2006) commenting on what relational or intersubjective psychoanalytic accounts have in common,

is the notion of a dynamic unconscious: "the way in which our mind transforms new relations into old ones (transference); others into parts of ourselves (introjection); and parts of ourselves into others (projection)" (Alford, 2002, p. 3), and it is this that distinguishes them from relational theories which revert to an idea of relationship between conscious, intentional bounded individuals. (p. 475).

One of the first puzzling questions we can ask is how the an extremely fragile ego constantly under threat of disintegration could *introject* and *project* in the first place, especially as these are said to be psychic processes that require some degree of stability and boundedness. Essentially what seems to be involved in holding even the first elements of what might constitute a personality or ego together, is that this "keeping together" experience is "performed initially from outside." Bick (1968) suggests that the baby has to struggle for the capacity to introject, and that this achievement of both infant and mother is related to embodiment, "The stage of primal splitting and idealization of self and object can now be seen to rest on this earlier process of containment of self and object by their respective 'skins'" (Bick, 1968, p. 484). Embodiment presupposes containment and the establishment of boundaries, and it would seem that before the infant can do anything at all, it has to experience an object in such a way that it intuits the concept of a space that can hold things. In other words, interdependent with the experience of being fed, is the creation of an "inside," and that,

(Bick)… showed the baby struggling for the capacity to introject and that this is a function of the skin, or rather a function of skin sensations which arouse fantasies of a containing object …(and)…the first introjection is the introjection of an object which provides a space into which objects can be introjected. Before projection can happen there has to be an internal object capable of containing which can be projected into an object before that object can be felt to contain a projection. (Hinshelwood, 1989, pp. 193–4).

It is in this way that the creation of a unified space comes about, where before there was none. Only with the existence of an internal psychologically enclosing space can the capacity to introject emerge. The first achievement is to win the concept of a space that holds things, "the infant in gaining the nipple in his mouth has an experience of acquiring such an object – an object that closes the hole (the mouth and other orifices) in the skin boundary. (Hinshelwood, 1989, p. 194)." This experience is fundamentally rooted in the somatic-affective domain. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, *a fundamentally social milieu*.

Although the Kleinian account of psychic development starts from neurobiological assumptions regarding survival and existence (e.g., instincts) the boundaries between what constitutes the "external" and "internal" are initially very blurred. In other words, while it is assumed that at some basic level the infant orients to the fact that the breast-sustenance (part-object) is very much external, it is just as much a construction from within, or as Kristeva (2001) puts it:

(an) internal image, to the extent that the fragile ego, as it constructs and deconstructs the boundary between the inside and outside, is where this quasi-object (or this object-being-constituted) is formed. From the outset, then, the *primal object* of the paranoid-schizoid position emerges, in Klein's view, if and only if it is an *internal object* constructed through a fantasy of omnipotence.

The initial experience for the infant became known as the paranoid-schizoid position, so called in that it amounts to the totality of the infant's instinctual desires and unconscious phantasies – where the libidinally invested breast as the primary good object reflects the power of the life instinct. For the infant the experience of the immediate satiation of hunger/ distress is not something that is "happening-to-me" as a separate individual but rather a state of vacillating "omnipotence-to-pain/ annihilation" (thus the term "paranoid-shizoid" position)2 . The metaphor of positions and movement between and within them should be understood as a shifting affective-dynamic psychic vantage point. Gradually however, and realized in part through neurobiological maturation (around 3–6 months), the rudimentary and fragile elements/part-objects begin a gradual synthesis or coming together. There are both negative and positive aspects of this moving toward the rather sombrely termed "depressive position3 ". The account here is that the infant begins to recognize that this gradually solidify "whole mother" is "understood to be the sole site of both sustenance and privation, and while this is much closer to reality, it necessarily ushers in a sense of the painful imperfections and limitations of life." (Likierman, 2001, p. 101). A representative account is that:

The infant loses the precious sense that there exists, somewhere, an ideal object of unlimited pleasure and satisfaction. This triggers an experience of a "loss of the loved object." The whole mother initially represents a despoiled perfection and provokes sorrow and indignant rage in turn. … It is this recognition that triggers the depressive position (Likierman, 2001, p. 101).

The depressive position, amongst other things, describes the initial recognition of awareness of separateness. In the paranoidschizoid position there is no such awareness. Before such inklings there is in effect, no infant, in other words, no subjectivity, no experience, no memory. However, there is a history that is marked on the body – it is just that there is no word-based history. This is what Winnicott (1974) meant when he states there is *no such thing as an infant* initially, only the motherinfant unit. The danger or challenge of becoming human is that of relating to people who ultimately you have no control over (i.e., unlike in the paranoid-schizoid position with the phantasy of omnipotent control). Winnicott describes the infant as becoming capable of the capacity for "ruth" – the possibility of feeling concern for another person. This arises through the

<sup>2</sup> One might think of this is a place where all that is experienced is the illusion of complete control or the experience of pain (hungry – feeding happens; or hungry – pain/abandonment).

<sup>3</sup> This movement from one position to another should not be seen as diachronic stage-like development. Instead, it is more akin to synchronic transformation, one where the initial experiences of the paranoid-schizoid position are overlaid with the depressive position, yet remain psychologically forever recoverable. The layering of positions is a more apt metaphor compared to the idea of a stage-like transition.

gradual awareness that another person is a subject as well as an object. Gaining relatedness and a sense of subjectivity involves the giving up and loss of omnipotence and unity-of-twoness (i.e., there is no awareness of separateness in the mother-infant unit). The assumption is that at some level this is an affective/ emotional loss but nevertheless a necessary and required element of psychological development and growth. Hollway (2006) makes the point that Winnicott, and psychoanalysis more generally:

sees separation and the ability to differentiate between one's own wishes and those emanating from outside as being crucial in the gradual achievement of self. Babies struggle to achieve unit status, and total independence is not the outcome of development. Winnicott (1968) understands children as proceeding from "absolute dependence, rapidly changing to relative dependence, and always travelling towards (but never reaching) independence" (p. 90). (Hollway, 2006, p. 476).

The gradual shifting away from the paranoid-schizoid position also engenders in the infant the desire to make reparation for the damage or destruction of the lost object (the phantasised internal object she used to have control over) who no longer exists. Hinshelwood (1989) comments that reparation, though it is concerned primarily with the state of the internal world and the good object (said to form the core of the personality) is usually expressed in action toward the mother. Kristeva (2001) makes the point that,

Klein's depressive position offers yet another innovation, one that will eventually encourage creativity: the feeling of depression mobilizes the desire to *make reparation to* objects. The baby, by believing that he is responsible for the loss of his mother, also imagine that he can undo the nefarious effects of his aggression through her love and care for him. "The depressive conflict is a constant struggle between the infant's destructiveness and his love and reparative impulses." (Segal, 1990, p. 60). To deal with the depressive suffering that results from his feeling of having damaged the external and internal object, the baby tries to make reparation and restoration to the good object. His love only grows in the process. (p. 79)

The fact that the move into, or rather the overlaying over [the paranoid-schizoid position] of the depressive position, is interdependent with affective-semiotic-discursive dimensions of normativity underpins affective developmental psychoanalytic thought (Green, 1999). Keeping in mind that from the outset we are dealing with a mother-child unit, the initial precursors to any process that leads to awareness involves something that you might call an affect-laden emotional mirroring that constitutes the interactive/participative expression of the mother-infant unit (i.e., we need to remember, there are initially no separate entities). To paraphrase Winnicott's description of the infant's initial experience, "When I look I am seen [*by somebody else*], so I exist; I can now afford to look and see" (emphasis added). This apparently simplistic phrase requires some unraveling.

What is being suggested is that the baby sees herself and gradually attains some intuition of the "self " through the reflection seen. Initially, what you see (about your "self ") is what the mother sees:

What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words, the mother is looking at the baby and *what she* (the baby) *looks like is related to what she* (the mother) *sees there*. All this is too easily taken for granted.' (Winnicott, 1971, p. 151 [Italics in the original]).

It is important to understand that what "she sees there" – will be the mother's own projections, wishes and desires regarding the "baby-entity." Needless to say, these projections and desires are saturated, in fact interdependent with, the particular cultural discourses prevailing in any particular context (see Demuth et al., 2012; for interesting examples of parental discursive difference across cultural contexts). And when the baby moves from existing (through being seen), and begins to "look and see," what the infant sees (seeing with) is already colored by the desire or intentionality of the mother - - the infants experience of the mother's desire for it to exist [as an infant]; in other words, something akin to: "'I want them to want me' and that is the condition for my wanting them." It is this complex interpenetration that forms the basis for the suggestion that the "inside" that is coming into being is already interdependently saturated with the "outside" (what is reflected back – through action, discourse, social semiosis of all forms).

In order to highlight the significance of action, transaction and affect in these mother–child dynamics Winnicott (1960) introduced the idea of a transitional space – which despite the everyday connotation that this amounts to something that exists *between* individuals, should be understood as both withinand-without – as well as potentially present (internal) even when the young child is on their own. As an example of the affective dynamics of the transitional space, Winnicott (1974) for example, proposed that through the projection out of, and onto, the *object* the child produces the conditions which allow recognition of "feeling"(s) possible. Here, the use of the phrase "produces the conditions" is significant because it is not as if the child is first feeling bad and then simply "puts the badness" outside. Rather, it is the projection that amounts to a defense against the badness (the infant or young child represses the recognition of the "internal" badness' – caused by hunger, aggressive impulse, constitutional characteristics or whatever by spontaneously producing the projection). And then, once projected outside, it can then (the badness) be recognized as something "not very nice" but now, and very importantly no longer "inside," but instead controllable and containable by being "in the other," or "in the object."

One can begin to see the significance of the idea of the transitional space for understanding affect, emotion, the identification of feeling(s) and how such experiences are related to the emergence of self-hood. In other words, in order to know that what is being experienced is "feeling" or affect never mind identifying what that feeling is, this will involve objectrelations – interacting with others and objects within a transitional space. Such an approach to subjectivity is echoed in the work of Hollway (2006) who argues that we are psycho-social "because we are products of a unique life history of anxiety- and desireprovoking life events and the manner in which they have been transformed in internal reality…(and)…because unconscious defences are an intersubjective process." (p. 466).

It was with reference to transitional dynamics that Winnicott (1974) suggested the mother should be seen as the infant's psychological matrix. In the beginning the mother provides the psychological or mental space within which the infant generates experience. Only gradually does the maternally provided psychological matrix begin to erode, and the infant tentatively initiates his/her own psychological matrix, one within which she/he develops the capacity to deal with separateness. What we have then is this gradual transformation from "mother-asenvironment" toward "mother-as-object." As the infant gradually attains individuation or awareness of "I-ness" she/he simultaneously begins to recognize the separateness of "infantmother," i.e., infant as self/object, and mother as other/object. Psychoanalysts after Winnicott draw attention to that element of taking up (attaining) a place in the "depressive position" where the mother provides "presence but absence" i.e., paradoxically being physically present with the child yet psychologically absent and contrastively, being psychologically present with/to the child and yet physically absent. Ogden (1992) highlights the ambiguous nature of this process, commenting,

This paradox can be understood in the following way: the mother is absent as object, but is there as the unnoticed, but present containing space in which the child is playing. The mother must not make her presence as object too important, for this would lead to child to become addicted to her as omnipotent object. The *development of the capacity to be alone* is a process in which the mother's role as invisible co-author of potential space is taken over by (what is becoming) the child. In this sense, the healthy individual, when alone, is always in the presence of the self-generated environmental mother. (p. 182) [emphasis added]

The proposal that the "internal," private experiential domain is in effect initially interpenetrated with the experiences of another (the mother) necessitates accommodating a somewhat paradoxical way of thinking – certainly one at odds with ideas on the construction of the self in cognitive-developmental psychology (e.g., Harter, 1999; Pfeifer and Peake, 2012). The suggestion that the formulating elements of a sense of self are in effect co-authored, with the infant initially possessing no recognition of what is going on, points to a certain ambiguity regarding symbolization and the social-semiotic basis of selfness. In a way this could be understood as the sense of self forever containing the "shadow of the other" (mother) in addition to the observation that entering or taking up a selfposition in discourse and language presupposes the appropriation of the available discourses in context.

# CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Part of the impetus for this review topic is the concern with examining the interdependence between psychological phenomena and the discursive and embodied practices of social interaction. Earlier the suggestion was made that part of the reason why CA has particular difficulties with addressing the relationship between affect and action, is the avoidance or elision of discussion regarding any construct or concept that presupposes an interiority of mental states, internal psychic life or inaccessible affective state. Such a view is certainly defensible given the suspicion over the excessive formalism of contemporary cognitive science allayed with debatable ascriptions regarding the causal dynamics of the cognition-emotion-behavior link (Coulter, 1999). It is also defensible given the participantoriented empirical criteria of CA and the associated skepticism regarding over-interpretation. But at the same time, there may be a sense in which CA, in avoiding theoretical dialogue with psychoanalytic thought is missing an opportunity to examine implicit presuppositional assumptions that may lie behind adopting agnostic positions. In other words, the manner in which elision take place seems to result in there nevertheless remaining (if "neutral") an implicit model of the infant/child mind, e.g., a resource identifying pattern detecting entity (Wootton, 1997; Lerner et al., 2011). The participant-oriented evidential requirements of CA may engender a reticence to consider what alternative, if somewhat marginalized perspectives such as object-relations theory and psycho-social approaches might have to offer. The proposal is that CA may find in psychoanalytic thinking a fruitful framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action.

A number of possible directions for an empirically grounded CA theory of personhood/subjectivity could emerge from studies that for example, examine in detail the earliest moments of parent-infant engagement, documenting and explicating the multi-modal dimensions of participation, action, and affect. Mondada (2019) in a recent commentary on expanding multimodal analysis in CA, makes that point that participants engage with their bodies not only to communicate with each other, but also in sensing the world – arguing that multisensorial practices are intersubjectively organized. Infant-focused CA studies of the earliest sensorial experiences following birth might help highlight how the status of "subjectivity" or personhood comes about in the first instance. Furthermore, examining these earliest moments longitudinally would help identify the circumstances within which the presuppositional grounding of the "infant-as-subject" begins to emerge. One could also begin to examine, given Winnicott's (1968) argument, whether in the talk and discourse that mothers and fathers first direct toward infants, we find evidence of culturally specific representations of idealized infancy (e.g., along lines similar to Demuth et al., 2012). Finally, we might conjecture that if whatever we understand as unconscious defenses are in fact intersubjectively constituted, then by examining early parent– child interaction at a sufficiently level of granularity, we should be able to highlight those circumstances whereby the infant/ young child learns what *not* to say – learning that there is Forrester Psychoanalytic Normativity

much beyond language that needs to be kept under control (inappropriate actions, non-verbal misdeeds and associated behaviors that might contravene the "doing being ordinary" of everyday members' methods).

By way of a concluding comment one can say that in the work of psychoanalysts such as Klein and Winnicott we are presented with a thoroughly relational conception of human nature. Phenomenologically, psychic life is already socially (and discursively) saturated. From this perspective it would seem that some form of affective-normativity suffuses the earliest experiences of the infant's life, given that from the outset identificatory phenomena (introjection and projection) are not only part and parcel of embodiment, but are also conveyed, recognized and produced within and through the prevailing discourses, which constitute social action. However, this is not to presuppose the methodological shadow of a discursive or CA "master-discourse." Hollway (2011) adopting a psycho-social perspective and commenting on the growing need to go beyond the "empty" subject of discourse analysis, argues that inner psychic processes are not "purely psychological," if that means sealed off from the external world, and that the boundaries between the inner and outer are porous, neither autonomous or static, and that psychoanalytic theory,

#### REFERENCES


specifies the way processes like splitting and identification act on social and cultural material (through meaning making and the expression of agency in practices). It does provide accounts of "how internal mental contents might be transformed" (citing Wetherell, 2003, p. 115; Hollway, 2011, p. 11).

Essentially, the proposal developed above highlights the tantalizing possibility that all "psychic" or psychological life (whatever we understand that to be) is somehow inherently social or infused with a socially shared normativity. We are of course still left with the challenge of how the affect-laden socially normativity that may underpin embodied parent-infant practices seen at the beginnings of life, finds expression – particularly given the suggestion that the essence of affect is "its capacity to seep into other domains and inhabit them" (Green, 1999, p. 285). Contemporary research in child-focused CA appears to be explicating how such seepage finds expression.

# AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.


**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Forrester. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# How Ideas Come Into Being: Tracing Intertextual Moments in Grades of Objectification and Publicness

#### *Andrea Karsten1 \* and Marie-Cécile Bertau2*

*1 Writing Center, Department of Psychology, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany, 2 Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, United States*

How do ideas come into being? Our contribution takes its starting point in an observation we made in empirical data from a prior study. The data center around an instant of an academic writer's thinking during the revision of a scientific paper. Through a detailed discourse-oriented micro-analysis, we zoom in on the writer's thinking activity and uncover the genesis of a complex idea through a sequence of interrelated moments. These moments feature different degrees of "crystallization" of the idea; from gestures, a sketch, a short written note, oral explanations to a final spelled-out written argument. For this contribution, we re-analyze the material, asking how the idea gets formed during the thinking process and how it reaches a tangible form, which is understandable both for the thinker and for other persons. We root our analysis in a notion of language as social, embodied, and dialogical activity, drawing on concepts from Humboldt, Jakubinskij, and Vygotsky. We focus our analysis on three conceptual nodes. The first node is the ebbing and advancing of language in idea formation – observable as a trajectory through linguistically more condensed or more expanded utterance forms. The second node is the degree of objectification that the idea reaches when it is performed differently in a variety of addressivity constellations, i.e., whether and how it becomes understandable to the thinker and to others in the social sphere. Finally, the third node is the saturation of the idea through what we call intrapersonal intertextuality, i.e., its complex and dialogically related re-articulations in a sequence of formative moments. With these considerations, we articulate a clear consequence for theorizing thinking. We hold that thinking is social, embodied, and dialogically organized *because* it is entangled with language. Ideas come into being and become understandable and communicable to other persons only by and within their different, yet, intertextually related formations.

Keywords: idea formation, language activity, objectification, intrapersonal intertextuality, articulation, Jakubinskij, Vygotsky, Humboldt

## INTRODUCTION

This contribution addresses the intriguing question of how ideas "come into being." That is, we ask how ideas get formed in thinking processes and how they reach a tangible form, which is communicable to others in the social sphere. Speaking of a communicable public form, we imply that *on their way to* reaching an exterior, socially understandable form, ideas may already crystallize to not-yet-communicable and non-public forms, i.e., forms for the thinker herself or himself. As we intend to show, these forms are different in stability, in their degree of verbal articulation,

#### *Edited by:*

*Sanna Raudaskoski, University of Tampere, Finland*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Chris Sinha, Hunan University, China Nicole Anderson, Brigham Young University, United States*

*\*Correspondence: Andrea Karsten andrea.karsten@upb.de*

#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 05 March 2019 Accepted: 03 October 2019 Published: 01 November 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Karsten A and Bertau M-C (2019) How Ideas Come Into Being: Tracing Intertextual Moments in Grades of Objectification and Publicness. Front. Psychol. 10:2355. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02355*

**144**

and in meaning from the final other-addressed form. At the same time, we conceive of both the communicable public forms and the not-yet public forms as dialogical and addressed idea formations, which others and the thinker can perceive and experience due to their embodied and at least partly verbal form, oral or written. Our aim is to formulate a conception of thinking as social, dialogical, and embodied by promoting understanding of language as activity and thinking as language-related process.

We relate our conceptualization of this process to Vygotsky's (1987) considerations of the dynamics between thinking and speaking where the process of "inner speech" has an explicit formative and mediational role. On these grounds, we are mostly interested in what seems to be a succession of formative moments, a trajectory leading through and connecting different types of forms to each other into one "arch of thinking." Tracing these formative moments, we propose a close look into the intricate, highly time-sensitive entanglement of thinking and speaking, a movement between these two distinct, yet, inextricably related phenomena.

Observing empirical data from a prior study (Karsten, 2014a,b), we noticed different *degrees in the crystallization* of an idea within the thinking and articulating process of an expert academic writer revising a scientific article. These degrees are coupled with various forms of tangible (re)presentations, reaching from just body movements to pencil drawings on paper with handwriting, and to computer writing. Moreover, these tangible forms vary also in the degree to which linguistic features are used at all, and then how elaborated this usage shows to be: just a few words, or an elaborated sentence that is obviously fitting all the norms of a written piece for the writer's academic community.

This observation touches on the general question of how language is related to thinking. This issue is usually addressed by excluding language from the formation of thought, since language is traditionally not attributed any formative but only a transmitting function toward thoughts. Therefore, research investigates either idea formation with no mention of language or language production occurring after conceptual formation. For instance, creativity research in the fields of organizational and social psychology considers idea formation on the individual and group level, where discussions and other forms of verbalization appear as secondary products (Paulus, 2000; McAdam and McClelland, 2002; Kohn et al., 2019). Also, cognitive psycholinguistics is still based on a modular notion of speech production with verbal elements as outcomes. Models of oral speech production (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999; Pickering and Garrod, 2004) and of the writing process (Hayes and Flower, 1980; Hayes, 1996; Kellogg, 1996) consider language formulations as expressions of formed thoughts downstream from a pre-linguistic level of thinking. However, the notion of articulation we use implies a formative function of language on thinking.

In order to illuminate the process of idea formation in various degrees of crystallization, we re-analyze some core moments of our empirical material. Proposing an alternative theoretical framework for idea formation, we root this analysis in Vygotsky's notion of semiotic mediation, Humboldt's understanding of language as activity, and a general process ontological view (section "Theoretical Framework"). Prioritizing processes over substance, we argue that language can be understood as medium in the sense of element, within which individuals form their activities to each other and to themselves in a sequence of interrelated embodied movements. These movements lead to observable constellations of other-addressed and self-addressed utterances in time and space through which ideas come into being.

Setting the ground for the analysis, we present five successive moments from our data, during which our study participant develops an idea that is central to his writing process (section "Studying Idea Formation"). We trace his activities toward clarifying the idea for himself and articulating it for his reader, illustrating the formative sequence with figures and descriptions of the single steps he takes.

In a first analytical move, we connect our data to the work of the Russian dialogist Lev P. Jakubinskij, whose work was seminal for Vygotsky's conceptualization of the relation between thinking and speech (section "Observing Condensed and Expanded Language Forms"). Jakubinskij (1979) and Yakubinsky (1997) notices that in each communicative activity, there is an oscillation between the verbal and the non-verbal, a movement of moreor-less that is specific to what he calls functional forms of language and their genres (Bertau, 2008). We present a schema of two continua elaborated from Jakubinskij's observations according to which language forms can be classified, and apply it to our data. As a result, and in line with Jakubinskij's assumptions, we can confirm our first impression of a movement between ebbing and advancing language forms in our study participant's idea formation. We also identify moments of seemingly inward-directed activity that cannot be grasped with Jakubinskij's schema easily. We formulate thus the need to connect Jakubinskij's observations of the "outer" social phenomenon of other-addressed talk or writing with the phenomenon of inner speech according to Vygotsky (1987), which we reformulate as the spectrum of self-addressed forms of speaking.

A second analytical step focuses on the constellations of who addresses whom in the different sequences in our material and how these addressivity constellations co-influence the respective language forms that can be found (section "Varying Grades of Objectification Depending on the Constellation of Addressivity"). We will discuss how the addressivity constellations are related to certain grades of objectification or publicness and what this implies for the process of our study participant's idea formation. By objectification, we mean a genuinely language-based process that involves generating a *language-object* as recognizable, delineated entity and that leads to and is tied into *objectivity*, pertaining to common, social, or trans-individual language activity types – in this sense, objectivity amounts to publicness: the forms are fully public because they adhere to the form-andmeaning norms expected by the language community for a certain genre, so that their display will be accepted as "right."

Our last analytical step highlights the intertextual relations between the various forms we observe and discuss (section "Intrapersonal Intertextuality: A Crucial Process in Idea Formation"). From these observations, we derive that intrapersonal intertextuality, i.e., the movement of interrelated language forms through a series of moments and addressivity constellations while staying always tied back to the speakerthinker, is crucial for idea formation. It is only through the intertextual saturation of the idea – because it gets articulated and re-articulated to different moments, in different forms and for different addressees – that idea formation is completed and results in an objectified form communicable to social others.

Through our theoretically underpinned analysis, we aim to articulate a clear consequence for theorizing thinking. We hold that thinking is social and dialogically organized *because* it is entangled with language. It is therefore related to others in the social sphere, and it is embodied because it needs and takes the language forms showing different degrees of articulation, i.e., formal (syntax, lexicon, textual coherence) and semantic clarity, that render the forms understandable and communicable to social others. Our interpretation of Vygotsky's framework of semiotic mediation and the role of inner speech for thinking is at the core of this argument.

#### THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The standard metaphor of thought formation is that of expressing pre-verbal ideas by giving them a verbal form. Within this metaphor, there is an implicit conception of *language as an envelope* ready for the transmission of ideas: thoughts that are already completed get stuck in pre-formed verbal molds and then are given to others to unpack. This leads into representationalism with the basic idea of transfer of the represented cognitive items (Reddy, 1979; Linell, 2009). Many influential models for cognitive and communicative processes in psychology and language philosophy rely on this envelope metaphor.

Vygotsky's notion of semiotic mediation contrasts this view and conceptualizes *language as a medium* for thinking. The Vygotskian notion of medium is widely interpreted in terms of *language as a tool*, a discrete middle between the thinker and the social world. This is done so by Vygotsky himself in his older writings (e.g., Vygotsky and Luria, 1994, c.f., Keiler, 2002) and by most authors who build on Vygotsky's work. In this view, people can use the tool of language that society provides to them, but they also can to put it away when the thought is done.

Arguing for a conception of thinking as social, dialogical, and embodied leads us to specify the Vygotskian concept of semiotic mediation in terms of a notion of language that is radically performative and immanent, i.e., not abstractable from its sites and ways of occurring. Performativity and immanence of language as central notions to our argument can also be grasped with the metaphor of *language as medium*. However, we understand the medium precisely not as tool. Rather, the picture we propose is that of *medium as an element*, where the element is a living element allowing for specific lifeforms and activities – as water allows fish to swim. However, language as element is not pre-existing language activity as water pre-exists swimming; rather, as artifact, language comes into existence through language activity. By virtue of the medium language, individuals are forming their activities to each other and to themselves in interrelated movements – music or dance could be further suitable metaphorical images to exemplify this conceptualization.

Language-as-medium in this sense is the enabling and constraining element wherein thinking occurs for its social articulation (Bertau, 2014a). The basic idea of the mediumas-element contradicts both the tool and envelope metaphors in a sharp way, since these metaphors reduce language to a discrete entity at the free disposal of an agent and belong to what is known as substance ontology.

A substance ontological view prioritizes entities over processes. It is characteristic to Western thinking and the way of "describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative" (Seibt, 2018). Movement is here a feature of entities, but not their way of being, it needs thus to be explained (Schürmann, 2006). In contrast, process ontology (or philosophy) postulates that processes are primary and that entities are formed through processes. Processes give raise to, they *form* entities as certain ones, they lead to specific substances. This means that individual entities cannot be located outside of a process, rather they are coming into being by this process (Bertau, 2016). In process ontology, the hierarchy is reversed and the entanglement of processes and entities is assumed. Movement is thus a way of being and considered as principally happening. What needs to be explained are any forms of persistence, or structure, within the movement's flow (Schürmann, 2006). Our approach to thinking as social and embodied is based in process ontology. Insisting on the process while keeping structuring moments, we seek to understand how thinking occurs, i.e., how it develops into what we call and can delineate as "an idea" privileging processes over entities. For this reason, we explicitly opt for the metaphor of language-as-medium understood as an element (Bertau, 2014a).

*Language as medium in the sense of element* originates in Humboldt's language philosophy viewing language as activity, as "doingness" (von Humboldt, 1999; Seifrid, 2005; Bertau, 2014b). This specific kind of activity is instrumental to thinking, but with two key differences with regard to the tool idea. First, thinking occurs for an agent related to a listening and replying other; second, language has a clear formative effect to thinking – language is the "formative organ of thought" (von Humboldt, 1999, p. 54). Humboldt's "formative organ for thought" alters and (re-)organizes psychological processes. The partner is needed to fulfill and complete the specific forms as co-constructed and co-developed formation. For Humboldt, idea formation resides in articulating an idea through speaking to a listening and replying other. The uttered, i.e., formed languaged idea, is then reverberated back by the listener's understanding and reply to the thinking agent's own understanding. In this circling movement, language comes to be the medium wherein the idea comes to exist as understandable to oneself and sharable with others. On the grounds of Vygotsky's notion of interiorization, the self-other movement can be applied to oneself thus resulting in a self-self movement (Bertau and Karsten, 2018). Since we view this reversing of the direction of address to be more important and also conceptually more specific than the location of the process (Bertau and Karsten, 2018), we prefer to speak of "self-addressed forms of speech" instead of the Vygotskian term "inner speech."

We use the term "language activity" to signify language in this performative, immanent sense that privileges process over product (Bertau, 2011, 2014a). Interrelated with language activity, thinking has hence itself a social-dialogic (Bertau, 1999; Larrain and Haye, 2014) and concretely embodied quality – the latter qualifier specifically means *formed, shaped*. Therefore, we view semiotic means crucial to inner speech mediation (Vygotsky, 1987) as performed, situated, and embodied; language activity is this situated, embodied semiotic means, it is performed with others and for others in space and time.

Importantly, the characteristic quality of language activity includes not only dialogicality owed to the social site and addressee-orientation of the activity ("others in space and time"); it extends to its forms, or better *formations*. Speaking of the performative quality of language activity, we hence explicitly conceive language activity as per-formed activity. The performative quality thus indicates the social-dialogical unfolding of language activity with others in time and space *as well as* the forms this unfolding takes, including their modality or better: multimodality as, e.g., speech-and-gesture-gestalts. Then, dialogicality *and* formations both contribute to the social and embodied quality of mental acts; in other words, the dialogic and formative quality of language activity is kept in thinking processes. It is not converted into a complex structural string of elements or into abstracted propositions. It keeps the dialogic qualities and "evaluative accents" inherent to spoken words, i.e., to *formed* utterances (Vološinov, 1986). Language does not cease to be social-dialogical when used for the psychological individual sphere. Similarly, thinking happens for a person who, while thinking, does not cease to be that whole, engaged, affected, and embodied social being. Ideas come then into being through processes saturated with and informed by the dialogical and formative movements of language activity.

## STUDYING IDEA FORMATION

For obvious reasons, it is not easy to study such complex sociopsychological processes empirically. Idea formation often happens within moments of time and is to a large extent a silent process; many ideas are never uttered aloud to oneself or to others, nor do they become written down or presented in any other perceivable form. We see the following requirements to the study of idea formation. First, a qualitative approach is needed that studies the process in a (near to) real-life situation in order to not curtail the social complexity of idea formation; second, it is necessary to work with a complex idea articulated over a larger stretch of time, so that idea formation is slowed down; a microdevelopmental approach complies with a time-sensitive study of the becoming of an idea. Thirdly, the formation process should take place in an at least partly overt, perceivable fashion, in order to provide an entry point for analysis. Lastly, the subtleties of idea formation have to be grasped by a micro-descriptive and discourse-analytic approach that allows to characterize and classify the forms that are produced in sufficient detail. In the following, we present material from a prior study on writing processes that fits these requirements (Karsten, 2014b). The short excerpts from our data below make it possible to trace the becoming of an idea through a sequence of interrelated moments.

Martin, a cognitive scientist, works on the revision of a scientific paper that he received with reviewers' comments. In the extracts of his revision process presented here, he composes a paragraph that is intended to present a central argument in the text. However, Martin struggles with the exact articulation of this central idea for his readers and, as we will see, with the fact that he needs to clarify, i.e., articulate the idea for himself, too.

Martin's idea formation is presented in chronological steps, where the distinction of different steps is an analytical one. It refers to qualitative changes regarding Martin's activities – what he is doing in a specific moment – and to changes in gaze, posture, and writing tools and procedures. In terms of time, the individual steps follow each other seamlessly, there is no pause in between the sequences.

Step 1: Martin writes down the sentence "It is well known that salience saturates and cannot be increased beyond a certain asymptote," followed by two references. Then he continues with a new sentence in which he wants to explain the concept of salience to his readers. He stops after the words "That is, at a certain level of salience" (**Figure 1**).

Step 2: Martin pauses after the half-sentence, with his hands still on the keyboard. His gaze first moves from the screen and stares into space, then he closes his eyes and bends his upper body. Finally, he sinks down even more and rests his chin on his hand (**Figure 2**).

Step 3: Immediately after, Martin turns to his notebook that lies close to the upper right corner of his keyboard. With a

FIGURE 3 | Martin draws a graph on a notebook sheet (step3).

felt pen he draws a function curve and marks two sections of equal breadth with vertical lines and marks each with a delta symbol (Δ). One section is placed further to the left, where the curve's gradient is steep, the other section is placed further to the right, where the line is approaching an (imagined) horizontal asymptote and the rise is smaller. Under the graphic, Martin writes a short note "same delta, different increase" (**Figure 3**).

Step 4: Martin then turns back to his keyboard and computer, sets his fingers ready on the keyboard, and looks up into space. He rests here for some moments, then he bends down his upper body – a little less than before – and holds his right index finger to his lips in a "thinker's pose" (**Figure 4**).

Step 5: After that, Martin quickly turns to his keyboard and screen again, deletes "at a certain level of salience" and instead continues the sentence he left unfinished before to read: "That is, if salience is already high, a small increase in feature contrast leads to only a small increase in salience, whereas at a medium level of salience, the same increase in feature contrast leads to a larger increase in salience" (**Figure 5**).

# OBSERVING CONDENSED AND EXPANDED LANGUAGE FORMS

How can we characterize and identify the peculiarities of these instances in Martin's formation of his central idea? The Russian dialogist Jakubinskij (1979; Yakubinsky, 1997) provides a useful twofold continuum that can serve as a descriptive model to identify the exact utterance context for every instance and to provide an explanation for the associated utterance form.

Jakubinskij views human speech activity as a "manifold phenomenon" (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 321). According to him, one can identify a broad range of speech forms in relation to various psychological and sociological factors, such as the participant constellation of a communicative situation or the socio-physical context of speaking. The complex diversity of speech forms that Jakubinskij notes resonates with our notion of speaking and thinking as social and embodied activities with an emphasis on their tangible phenomenality. With the classification schema that Jakubinskij proposes, we can analytically

access the interrelation of linguistic phenomena with extralinguistic factors.

To classify utterance contexts, Jakubinskij identifies a *dialogic* versus a *monologic* form of verbal interaction on the one hand, and he contrasts a *direct, unmediated* form of interaction with an *indirect*, *mediated* form of interaction on the other hand (Jakubinskij, 1979, pp. 323–324). These distinctions result in two analytical continua with a variety of possible intermediate forms. At the *dialogic pole* of the first continuum, utterances are highly other-dependent and expect direct response and interruptions (e.g., a conversation during family dinner or a phone call with a friend), whereas the *monologic pole* is characterized by continuous and more "self-sufficient" forms of speaking (e.g., a conference talk or a novel). At the *unmediated* or *immediate pole* of the second continuum, co-presence and thus visual-aural perception of the other is characteristic (e.g., all kinds of face-to-face interactions, also those where others function as a tacit audience or as mere overhearers and bystanders, c.f., Goffman, 1981). The *mediated pole* of the second continuum does not provide a physical co-presence, and communication is mediated by writing (e.g., a scientific article or a letter), the telephone, or, nowadays, the whole range of digital media (e.g., a chat in a messenger app or an online video tutorial). Especially with the unmediated-mediated continuum, the (multi)modality of an utterance and its resulting specific tangible phenomenality is addressed – even though Jakubinskij does not use these exact terms.

Every utterance can be classified according to both continua, e.g., as highly dialogic and highly immediate (e.g., a face-toface dialogue between two closely acquainted persons); as highly dialogic and highly mediated (e.g., a chat on an instant messenger); as highly monologic and highly immediate (e.g., a keynote speech without the support of slides or other visualizations);



as highly monologic and highly mediated (e.g., a novel); or as any intermediate form imaginable (**Table 1**). Note that Jakubinskij's classification works along two organizing axes: structure of time of speech in the speaker (short duration – longer lasting duration) for continuum 1; co-presence of listening other(s) for continuum 2. Both axes together show that all speech is addressed to Other, independently of being oral or written, and whether the speaker shares the same time and space with an actual other.

According to Jakubinskij, an utterance's degree of dialogicality and its degree of mediatedness lead to certain formal features. Dialogic forms are compositionally simpler than monologic forms (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 334; Yakubinsky, 1997, p. 251). In dialogue, speakers have a common history both with regard to a possible shared stretch of lifetime and, most importantly, to a shared co-experience of the here-and-now micro-history and a co-construction of the given discourse. This results in shared knowledge that does not have to be uttered – the language forms are *abbreviated* and simplified syntactically (Yakubinsky, 1997, p. 256), whereas semantically they are *condensed* (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 269). Monologic forms, in turn, are more planned and focused, and their linguistic form is syntactically more interconnected (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 324) and *expanded* (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 270), since the speaker does not know to which extent (s)he can rely on shared knowledge. Immediacy and co-presence of the other allow for modifying or substituting of the said via mimics and gestures. Thus, the speech form can be abbreviated and simplified, and "[i]n combination with speech exchange th[e] role of visual perception, indeed, remains *and sometimes prevails*" (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 325, our emphasis). This is the reason why in our analysis we include a close look at the (multi)modality of the utterances under scrutiny. In turn, mediatedness leads to a lack of visual and aural perception of the other and thus prohibits that the different nuances of sense can be understood through means of facial expressions, gestures, intonation, and timbre (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 326). The mediated forms of speaking must rely on "words and their combination" (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 335) resp. their "concatenation" (Yakubinsky, 1997, p. 251) – they are thus expanded to substitute for the missing presence of the other and a shared here-and-now. Furthermore, extreme mediation like in writing has the effect that speech is fixed in its realization, and that something enduring persists (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 335). The writer pays attention to adequacy of the utterance with regard to his or her mental states and the speech form in itself is subject to judgment (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 334; Yakubinsky, 1997, p. 251).

With regard to our example of Martin's writing process, step 1 can be characterized as highly monologic and highly mediated. There is only Martin present, and he must build up both his readers' perspectives and the whole communicative situation voluntarily. There is an intended readership and the text is meant to be read, commented on, and judged by other people later, most prominently the reviewers. Yet, the production and the perception of written scientific publications are mediated and stretched over time. Adequacy with regard to content and formal characteristics of texts is key in this cultural practice. Thus, the written utterance produced in step 1 is a prototypical case of an expanded language form, due to its contextual conditions: written mode in a highly institutionalized discourse, and actual, but distant audience, that does not interfere with the text at the moment of production, but later on will do so. Interestingly, Martin seems not to be able to articulate the expanded form fully. He interrupts his writing in the middle of a sentence and continues with a very different form of activity.

Step 2 is still highly monologic according to Jakubinskij's definition, since there is no co-present other. However, we have reason to argue that Martin lapses into inner speech (Vygotsky, 1987) or, as we prefer to call it, self-addressed speech. Physically, Martin performs a movement of withdrawal, directing his gaze away from his monitor up to almost closing his eyes and taking his hands away from the keyboard and placing one hand in front of his mouth. This is a culturally typical embodiment of self-directed thought and contemplation, a "thinker's pose." No present or distant others are meant to take part in this activity. In fact, Martin performs the turning-away from any others in a very strongly marked embodied fashion; he turns away from his other-directed text on the computer screen and thus withdraws himself from any interlocutor in the true sense of the word. On the second continuum, step 2 can be classified as highly unmediated. No overt language activity and no perceivable motion at all, is noticeable. The forms of Martin's supposed covered language activity cannot be inferred simply. Thus, we will return to this instant in the next section, in order to further discuss what possible language forms are at work and what their status for idea formation is.

Step 3 is, again, highly monologic. The writing scene and the artifacts used (paper notebook and pen) implicate a genuinely monologic setting. There are still no co-present others, but there also seems to be no intended audience either. This does not mean that the Martin's activity is un-addressed, but rather, that it is again self-addressed. This is not the official document that Martin will feed back into the review process after completion, but a personal sketch. It is not designated for a reaction or response. The third step is mediated both graphically and by writing. Aptly, bodily forms (gestures, facial expressions) do not feature particularly in this third step. In contrast to step 1, the linguistic forms used, "same delta, different increase" are highly condensed and "predicative." Predicativity, according to Vygotsky (1987, pp. 267–268, in his interpretation of Jakubinskij), is a syntactic feature of inner speech that can also be found in external dialogic situations, when the subject of the interaction is known to all interlocutors. Predicativity is thus one feature of dialogic and immediate forms of speech, feeding into their abbreviated character. This leads to the impression that without explanation, the short "verse" Martin jots down is not understandable to others. For Martin, however, it seems to be crucial for his idea formation. Here, mediation is used in a way that contrasts with how it is used in step 1, namely in combination with a self-addressed layout. Therefore, the language forms that Martin produces are different from those in step 1: not extended and objectified, but idiosyncratic and condensed.

Step 4 is interesting because it strikingly mirrors Martin's body movements in step 2. The analysis in terms of both continua is the same: this is a highly monologic form, but in the self-addressed sense, and a highly unmediated form as well. Again, this "thinker's pose" needs to be scrutinized further, because of its culturally marked covert quality and its gesture of withdrawal from others. With regard to the becoming of Martin's idea, it is interesting to note that Martin sits back at what seems to be his typical writing pose at first. But then his body posture changes from the more expressive mode to a contemplative mode. He seems not to be able to actually articulate his idea in a written, other-addressed, and expanded form yet.

Finally, in step 5, this stage is reached, and Martin continues the sentence he was not able to articulate minutes before.

Looking at the language forms that Martin produces, an interesting aspect becomes visible, which we labeled elsewhere as the ebbing and advancing of language (Bertau, 2008), more precisely, of the linguistic factors. According to both theoretical considerations following Jakubinskij and to what we will further show in our analysis, this movement observable in language activities is correlated to the speaker's bodily activities. In the case of linguistic factors ebbing, i.e., becoming less developed, articulated, and elaborated, the speaker's body (intonation, mimic, gestures) acts as modulator of the uttered meaning-forms and sometimes even replaces them, as in the case of Martin's "thinker's pose." In the reversed case of advancing linguistic factors, the body recedes to the point of becoming invisible, not present anymore. The punctuation system in alphabetic writing can be viewed as supplying a kind of substitute for intonation (e.g., ?!) and speaking rhythm (e.g., ;,), supported in this by all kinds of layout forms. In this way, the phenomenality of language activity shows a constant oscillation, a transitional movement between condensed and expanded forms that are related to the presence of an Other and to the time amount given to the utterance.

# VARYING GRADES OF OBJECTIFICATION DEPENDING ON THE CONSTELLATION OF ADDRESSIVITY

The observed pulsating movement between condensed and expanded language forms and the related ebbing and advancing of bodily forms like posture, gesture, facial expression, or intonation is set in motion by varying extra-linguistic factors. These factors can be partly specified by Jakubinskij's continua of dialogicalitymonologicality and mediatedness-unmediatedness. But the pulsating movement also seems to be due to how much the speaking, writing, or thinking is self-addressed or other-addressed. In the following, we will investigate how the exact addressivity constellation of a given utterance co-influences a certain language form. We will further discuss how this interaction between addressivity constellation and language forms is related to a certain grade of objectification in the process of idea formation.

For this purpose, we will leave the temporal sequence of Martin's writing process at this point and turn to the ebbing and advancing moments of Martin's idea formation in the interplay of changing addressivity constellations. In the context of the original study, Martin's writing process was re-situated in a video-based interview, a video-confrontation. The setting is illustrated in **Figure 6**. It allowed for a video-based dialogical retrospection of Martin's writing process by Martin himself together with the researcher-interviewer. For this purpose, the researcher presented parts of the video to Martin several weeks after the writing process took place. The interview format was semi-structured and the questions focused on what Martin saw himself doing on video, what his thoughts and intentions were, and what explanations he had about what he was doing there. Martin's reconstructions were acknowledged, further explored, discussed, and sometimes called into question. We have argued in previous publications that Martin reflected and re-presented his "inner" (i.e., un-vocalized, silent) dialogues during writing in the subsequent interview setting, and this was marked by a differing basic addressivity constellation with the researcher as a co-present person and Martin's main addressee (Karsten, 2014a,b; Bertau and Karsten, 2018).

The first transcript from the video-confrontation interview is a scene, where Martin (M) renders a first rough description of his central idea, the "argument with the curve" (line 4243) to the interviewer Andrea (A).

#### Transcript 1: The argument with the curve


In this first transcript, there are several formations in relation to Martin's central idea, performed in different addressivity constellations. The *first formation* is performed as enacted dialogue between "people" (line 4229) and Martin, ranging from line 4228 to line 4241. The enacted dialogue is framed by a comment to the interviewer "the argument is so to speak" (line 4227), which sets the imaginary scene for the dialogue. We can assume that "people" are either Martin's reviewers, their respective work groups, or Martin's research community in general including all the groups at different universities that work on similar problems as Martin and his group do. Martin first gives their position "in the one task the effects do (not) exist, categorically not" (line 4229) – the first communicative move in the enacted dialogue. Then he immediately contrasts it with his own objecting position, which he presents in the form of direct speech, accompanied with a number of gestures: "now it could be the case that they maybe are smaller" (lines 4238, 4240). This is the second move to the enacted dialogue. Martin's raised index finger in line 4239, a culturally typical conventionalized and thus symbolic gesture, marks this move as his own personal contribution to the scientific argument between contrasting approaches. It indexes the request to speak or a kind of "veto" in a multi-party discussion.

Martin then leaves the enacted dialogue and comments to the interviewer: "and then I can make this argument with the curve" (adjusted translation, line 4243). Here, we have the *second formation* in a different addressivity constellation: a denomination of the idea as "argument with the curve" addressed to the interviewer. The semantically condensed form resembles a sort of headline or title to three instances: (1) to the whole idea formation process during Martin's writing process that Andrea and Martin are watching; (2) to the textual section Martin composes during this stretch of video (c.f., **Figures 1, 5**); and (3) to the third, not yet performed move in the enacted dialogue just discussed – Martin's paper as an elaboration and justification of his "veto" (second move) to the others' position (first move).

Finally, the *third formation* in relation to Martin's central idea is his gesture in line 4244, which is rendered in **Figure 7**. Martin's hand movement indexes the form of the curve and is a twin form to the graphic on Martin's notebook in **Figure 3**.

<sup>1</sup> The German transcript follows the conventions of the GAT 2 transcription system (Selting et al., 2009). [] mark overlapping speech or acts, sometimes clarified by subscript numbers; (()) mark comments to the speakers' turns, describing mainly their actions, gestures, and body movements; () mark short (-), medium (--), or long (---) pauses, or the exact length of the pause in seconds is indicated within the brackets; °h marks breathing in, capitalization marks stressed syllables. A rough English transliteration is given beneath every turn. Note that this translation is meant to render the German syntax and wording as exactly as possible. Adjusted and smoothed translations are given in the text, when the respective turn is analyzed.

The gesture is not symbolic, but iconic. By means of its phenomenal similarity, it functions thus as a chain between the notebook graphic and the headline formulation "argument with the curve."

In terms of addressivity constellations, the first formation enacts an imagined constellation with the researcher as witnessing audience. The second formation is directly addressed to the interviewer, as is the third formation, which unfolds and re-enacts the past representation on the notebook for her. Within these addressivity constellations, the idea is articulated in various ways. Characteristically, the oral and gestural formations embedded in the different dialogically organized constellations do not become fully extended in contrast to the final spelled-out written argument (step 5, c.f., **Figure 5**). They are rather condensed forms, marked by what Vygotsky (1987, p. 277) called "influence of sense," both in the literal meaning of infusion and in the common meaning of impact.

The next transcript sheds light on the idea "behind" the "argument with the curve." It clarifies what Martin was trying to articulate in his unfinished sentence in step 1: "and I want to tell the people that do not have the concept: what does saturating actually mean" (adjusted translation, lines 4711–4712). The clarification occurs in the subsequent interview setting as an intertwinement of addressivity constellations so that the utterances are working and valid for several addressees.

## Transcript 2: And saturating means that…

4708 M: das find ich jetzt auch interessant *that I find now also interesting* 4709 also ich ich weiß was saturieren ist *well I I know what saturating is*

	- 4713 [=stopp] *=stop*
	- 4714 [((hebt zeigefinger))] *rises index finger*
	- 4715 A: ((hält film an)) *stops video*
	- 4716 M: und saturieren heißt dass ähm *and saturating means that uhm*
	- 4717 [wenn du hier (--) eine bestimmte strecke nach rechts gehst *if you here (--) (go) a certain stretch to the right go* hast du n GROßen gewinn *you have a GREAT gain* 4718 und wenn du hier ne strecke die gleiche strecke nach rechts gehst *and if you here (go) a stretch the same stretch to the right go* hast du einen kleinen gewinn] *you have a small gain* 4719 [((steht während seines turns auf, zeigt an projektion und setzt sich wieder))] *gets up during his turn, points at video-projection and sits down again*
	- 4720 A: mhm *uhum*
	- 4721 M: das heißt saturieren *that means saturating*

While Martin and the interviewer are watching step 1 (the unfinished sentence, c.f., **Figure 1**) and 2 (the first thinker's pose, c.f., **Figure 2**) of Martin's idea formation process, Martin says that he indeed knows what saturation means (line 4709), and that he was going to explain the idea of saturation to those readers who do not know this (lines 4711–4712). However, we can assume that he was not able to fully articulate this idea yet, because he interrupted his composing process (step 1). We further assume that he tried to articulate the idea, his "mental concept" in his own words (line 4710), silently while sitting and thinking (step 2). According to Martin's reconstruction, step 2 is indeed the attempt to find an articulation for his readers. Martin again renders his aims during writing in the form of an *enacted dialogue* with the interviewer as audience. To determine the addressivity constellation, note that Martin does not use indirect speech with a relative clause (≈ and I want to tell the people that do not have the concept *what saturating actually means*), but direct speech. This results in the formulation of a direct rhetorical question, addressed to his imagined readers: "what does saturating actually mean?" (adjusted translation, line 4712). As we know, this question, which might have been there during Martin's thinking in step 2, is not answered in the text immediately. Instead steps 3 (graphic on the notebook, c.f., **Figure 3**) to 4 (second thinker's pose, c.f., **Figure 4**) follow before Martin seems to be able to articulate the answer in his text (step 5, c.f., **Figure 5**).

In line 4713, Martin asks Andrea to stop the video – the image shows his graphic sketch of the function curve (step 3). Interestingly, he simultaneously raises his index finger (line 4714), calling for his interlocutor's attention in the same way as he did moments before in the context of the projected dialogue with the addressees of his text (c.f., analysis of transcript 1). Martin goes on to say: "and saturating means that" (line 4716). Instead of answering the rhetorical question for the intended readership, Martin transcends the two contrasting addressivity constellations by giving the answer to the co-present interviewer: "and saturating means that uhm if you here (--) (go) a certain stretch to the right go you have a GREAT gain, and if you here (go) a stretch the same stretch to the right go you have a small gain" (lines 4716–4718). Evidence for this interpretation are the deictics "here" in line 4717 and 4718 together with Martin's getting up and pointing to the two sections of the curve at the video-projection (line 4719). His finishing phrase "that does saturation mean" (adjusted translation, line 4721) is valid for several addressivity constellations. It is an affirmation addressed to the interviewer, a concluding answer addressed to his imagined readers in the enacted dialogue and maybe a reflection of his thinking during step 2 (first thinker's pose, **Figure 2**).

The next analysis clarifies this supposedly occurring selfaddressed phase during Martin's writing (step 2). The videoconfrontation interview allows a glimpse into the idea formation process that takes place in silence. Prior to the following episode, Martin related that his thinking is not completely verbal and that often a translation between non-verbal thoughts into words needs to happen. Andrea asks Martin for a retrospective introspection: "what is that kind of thinking like, if it is not with words?" (adjusted translation, line 4868).

#### Transcript 3: Almost with moving




4885 M: also

 *well* 4886 s s (-) SO is das bloß ohne s zu machen *l l (-) LIKE THAT is that only without doing it*

The question the interviewer asks in line 4868 explicitly refers to Martin's first thinker's pose (step 2): "if you somehow feel into it what happens, when you sit there and think" (adjusted translation, lines 4870–4871). Notably, Martin takes his time to answer (line 4872). The 12 s of silence are indications that Martin re-lives his thinking process. His answer seems to be somewhat surprising to himself as the glottal stop particle "aʔ" (line 4873) suggests, together with the comment: "it is interesting what kind of modality that is" (adjusted translation, line 4874). Martin concludes that his thinking process is highly embodied, "almost with moving" (line 4875). At this point, Martin describes exactly what we have deduced from Jakubinskij's theory previously: an almost total ebbing of linguistic factors and the speaker's (or thinker's) body movement as carrier of the not-yet verbalizable meaning.

In the next step, this not-yet-verbal form gets re-enacted for the interviewer (lines 4879–4883 and **Figure 8**). Interestingly, there is a verbal part of the reconstruction, but it is highly deictic and almost does without denominations: "well that is almost as if to know that *this* and *this* results in something *like this on the one hand* and something *like that on the other hand*" (adjusted translation, lines 4879–4883). This husk-like verbal form is accompanied (or rather: completed) by a gesturemovement-complex (**Figure 8**). Martin first performs a bracketformed gesture with his left hand at the first "this," then another bracket-formed gesture of the same size and form with his right hand at the second "this." Then he moves his left hand a little further up, rotates it, and enlarges the span between his index and thumb with "like this." Finally, he also rotates his right hand, moves it even higher than his left hand, and lessens the span between index and thumb with "like that."

The gestural forms and their locations in front of Martin's upper body are clearly twin forms of the delta distances in

the notebook graphic and the respective risings of the curve within these deltas (see **Figure 3**). Like the bow-shaped gesture analyzed above, these forms are not conventionalized symbolic gestures, but iconic ones, resembling their twin forms on Martin's notebook in size and shape. Further, Martin's re-enactment of his thinking process is exactly this: a re-enactment. It is not to be mistaken for the "original" thinking; it is a form addressed and exteriorized for the interviewer. Martin even names this fact: "it is like that, *only without doing it*" (adjusted translation, line 4886) and "well that is *almost* well" (line 4877). However, from the formal resemblance between the re-enactment of the thinking in step 2 and the graphic representation in step 3, we can infer that Martin's bodily felt movement has a similar form as well. Another twin form to this idea that we have identified is Martin's condensed verse "same delta, different increase" that he jots down under the graphic in step 3 (**Figure 3**). In the re-enactment, we can identify further resemblances in form and meaning: the two first bracket gestures actually resonate with "same delta," whereas the two following rotated bracket gestures emblematize the "different increase."

It is at this stage of the analysis that we have to point to a theoretical move we want to make in order to understand how ideas come into being in various grades of objectification and publicness. The linguist Jakubinskij conceives of the distinguishing criteria and the affiliated more condensed or expanded language forms we have used in our analysis (and of their respective gestural and intonational substitutes or modulators) exclusively for the pragmatic field of social language usages. Our analysis of addressivity constellations showed, however, that it is crucial for the way the idea is formed *who the addressee is* as well as *how this real or imagined other (or self!) is addressed*. The theoretical move we see as key to understand how ideas come into being is thus to translate *all*

of Jakubinskij's differentiations and possible language and bodily forms occurring in the social pragmatic field – and thus also the specific (multi)modality of an utterance – to self-addressed speech. We do this in explicit contrast to Vygotsky (1987), who – as we have given to understand – also applies Jakubinskij's ideas to his research object inner speech (we reformulated as self-addressed speech). As opposed to our analytical and theoretical suggestion, Vygotsky translates *only one* of these forms to self-addressed speech, namely the highly abbreviated and condensed form known from immediate dialogic interaction that he labels "absolute predicativity" (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 267). Our analysis shows, however, that there are in fact many possible forms for self-addressed speech. In Martin's case, this is most visible in the difference between (and resemblance of!) the non-verbal felt body movement (inferred from its later re-enacted form), the graphic sketch and the verbal, yet highly condensed verse "same delta, different increase." All three forms are interrelated, and they are also crucially related to Martin's final maximally expanded formation to his idea in step 5, when he articulates the idea for his readers in the form of the sentence: "That is, if salience is already high, a small increase in feature contrast leads to only a small increase in salience, whereas at a medium level of salience, the same increase in feature contrast leads to a larger increase in salience" (**Figure 5**).

How can we understand which processes take place here? Our theoretical access is the notion of objectification. The term objectification denotes a process with two interrelated aspects. First, it is a process *generating an object* as recognizable, delineated entity; second, it is a process *leading to and tying into objectivity* that pertains to common, social, or trans-individual activity types – language activity par excellence. Their meeting point is language in the sense of the embodied-performative and symbolicconventionalized activity put forth in the Humboldtian tradition: it creates objects in a certain sense and objectifies, also in a certain sense. This understanding rests upon interconnected ideas about language, thinking, and consciousness that start in Humboldt and are taken up by Vološinov and Vygotsky (Bertau, 2014b). For these thinkers, objectification is a process of transformation which describes a movement between subjectivity and objectivity, between the individual and the social, public sphere. Within this movement, ideas are generated, thoughts are articulated and become understandable, i.e., sharable meaning-forms are shaped out. Stating the formative function of language for thought, Humboldt refers to articulation as a core moment in the thinking process, a moment that generates discernible entities (*articulus* being the small joint within a moving whole). As mentioned previously (section "Theoretical Framework"), Humboldt does not only conceptualize the formative function of language for thought, he assigns a core role to the listening-replying other in this process. In this way, otherness grounds the process of objectification.

Looking first at how an *object* is generated, a trans-formation is conceived that leads from the idiosyncratic, dense, and fluid sense with highly unstable and moving, emerging-dissolving fragmented forms to the societal stabilized meaning-forms. Abbreviated language forms such as Martin's self-addressed verse "same delta, different increase" (**Figure 3**) or his deictic dialogic "this and this makes that and that"-form (**Figure 8**) can be located in-between the idiosyncratic and the societal stabilized forms. The contrast between sense and meaning is Vygotsky's (1987) framework to explain the dynamics occurring between thought and word in inner speech toward external speech, it rests itself on seminal ideas of Paulhan (1928; Bertau, 2014b). Vygotsky uses the term objectification alongside with materialization (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 257, 280): thoughts become tangible, they get a materialized form in language activity (oral or written) through the mediation of inner speech. Vološinov views the occurring materialization more radically as pertaining to inner speech *already*, for an "incarnation" is needed to consciousness – incarnation being nothing but objectification: "*Outside objectification, outside embodiment in some particular material* (the material of gesture, inner word, cry), *consciousness is a fiction*" (Vološinov, 1986, p. 90). The short list Vološinov provides in brackets is a precious complement to Vygotsky's (Paulhan's) inner sphere of sense being explicitly located outside of any language forms as "pure meaning." This inclusion can be linked to the broad and explicitly multimodal notion of language Vološinov advocates for, taking up his teacher Jakubinskij (Bertau, 2008).

In the previous section, we have illustrated, how Jakubinskij's notion of language puts forth language forms (speech forms) as dynamic and anchored in life; they reach into the non-verbal dimension of any language activity thus providing the tangible interface between language and its actual reality. We have shown how the speaking body is not disregarded, its speakinglistening postures, gestures, intonations and inflections, its gazes and rhythms. As Jakubinskij says, in oral-dialogic communication, meaning is modified by the body (Jakubinskij, 1979, p. 325). So the Soviet language thinkers start with an embodied notion of language, and for Vološinov, this reaches into thinking, inner speech, consciousness.

Concerning the second side, the *objectivity of language* is a highly specific type of objectivity for it is bendable toward individual diversity and toward objectivity or, as von Humboldt (1999) puts it, the objective. Following Humboldt, this comes from the fact that language's first purpose is to communicate something to the fellow societal partner. In Martin's case, this is his readers, those who do not know what saturation is and those he wants to convince with his "argument with the curve." Verbal communication is necessarily pregnant with individuals and their commonality, which they have agreed upon, conventionalized and that transcends each of them for the sake of communion-communication. Thus language needs to be, and is for Humboldt, subjective *and* objective, where the objective does precisely not reach a detachable and absolute value (Di Cesare, 1996) but stays with the individuals who need to articulate their uniqueness to each other *as* socialized individuals. In our example, Martin's idea never fully "leaves" the fundamental dialogue it is meant for, i.e., the extremely mediated and monologic, yet explicitly other-addressed setting, where Martin objects the other researchers' argument by his "veto" (c.f., the analysis of transcript 1). His search for a communicable meaningform is not a search for an abstract, "true" envelope for his idea, but a trajectory toward a dialogically functional, shared objectification. The power of language resides in holding the subjective within the objective and allowing the subjective to live within the objective – in fact, to ever-replenish the objective through each language activity, which is individually unique while making use of others' words, heard in others' mouth.

## INTRAPERSONAL INTERTEXTUALITY: A CRUCIAL PROCESS IN IDEA FORMATION

It is exactly the concept of the individual-in-the-public and the subjective-in-the-objective that builds the ground for understanding idea formation as a complex intertextual process. As said, language-as-activity emphasizes the performative aspect of language and highlights the dynamics of multimodal forms and formations taking place in time and through time. The time dimension is crucial. It connects language activities and their forms to each other, forming a dialogical texture, or, as Bakhtin (1986, p. 91) put it, a dialogical chain between utterances. These connections between utterances occur within a given verbal communication between actual partners as well as in a trans-temporal way, thus relating the speech forms of speakers (same and different ones) across time. Language itself is understood as these wide-reaching dialogical relationships, echoing, questioning, re-taking, and altering each other in each specific moment of being uttered. Speaking amounts to join into and to weave oneself in this wide and dynamic net of mutually dialogically responding, language (or speech) forms (Bertau, 2014c). As we interpret it, the Bakhtinian term of intertextuality (as it was termed by Kristeva, 1980) highlights the dialogical intertwinement between embodied utterances or texts, not between people. In fact, the conceptual shift from dialogically related *speakers* to dialogically related *utterances* (then also voices) is prepared by Jakubinskij (1979) putting forth the idea of the interdependency of utterances, and completed by Bakhtin (1986) and Vološinov (1986). Shifting the conceptual focus of dialogicality from the uttering individuals to the utterances themselves is an important theoretical move that sheds clear light on the functioning of language-as-activity: it is exactly by detaching, by emancipating the utterance from a speaking body that the spoken and listened-to word gets its communicative-cognitive power; it is through this detachment that different dialogical forms and their voices can interfere and merge in one speaker in speaking *and* in thinking (Bertau, 2011; Gratier and Bertau, 2012). The concept of intertextuality encompasses the interrelated (or interdependent) forms and formations of language-as-activity that take place in and through time; in this sense, intertextuality happens for speakers as much as it is created by them as they re-enact others' words within new addressivity constellations; they alter and saturate these words with a new, present-moment usage that receives the specificities of that moment in time. Taking the broad and dialogical notion of the Soviet language thinkers seriously, intertextual reprises will include embodied dimensions such as intonations and gestures to utterances and they will take place within and across modalities.

In our material, we find such intertextual reprises that conform with our reading of the concept of intertextuality. There is, however, one peculiarity: all of these forms are utterances by just one speaker, Martin, but performed in different moments, with differently embodied forms and directed to different addressees. Concluding our analysis, we sample the two most striking groups of Martin's intertextual reprises (what we have called "twin forms" until now):

Intertextual reprises, group I:


Intertextual reprises, group II:


Following Vološinov's and Vygotsky's line of thought and our analytical findings, the concept of intertextuality seems also to be suited to describe intrapersonal dialogical relations between multimodal utterances like the ones we have sampled here. Again, this is supported by the conceptual shift accomplished by the Soviet focusing on utterances rather than on speaking individuals (Bertau, 2011). Making this theoretical extension, we use the term *intrapersonal intertextuality* to grasp the intertextual reprises performed by one and the same speaker in different moments. Our proposition is that Martin's idea needs the intrapersonal intertextual saturation throughout both reprise groups to become fully objectified (in the Humboldtian sense), articulated, and extended in the written sentence. This is supported by the following transcript, where Martin reflects the dynamics of his idea formation process.

#### Transcript 4: And then I can say it


According to Martin's own retrospection, he needed to perform his idea throughout these consecutive formative moments to be able to articulate it in an expanded, written, and otheraddressed form: "and then I can say it" (line 4748). To him, the process is indeed about *one* idea – "that is *exactly* what I wanted to say," he affirms (line 4745). However, this idea was not fully graspable at first; it only became more explicable and more objectified through the intertextual process.

#### CONCLUSION

The manifoldness of embodied language forms (including indexical and symbolic gestures, postures, intonations, etc.) along with their intertextual density in which Martin (and the other participants in the original study, for that matter) re-constructs and explains his thoughts and doings to the researcher during the interview is striking. Taking these forms together with the many related forms already produced "naturally" in the writing situation (see sections "Studying Idea Formation" and "Observing Condensed and Expanded Language Forms"), one can observe movements and interrelations between body movements, gestures, drawings, self-directed talk, addressed explanations, written text, and many more. Through such a multiplicity of formations, also the "the argument with the curve," on which we focused our present analysis, develops from a fuzzy, condensed bodily feeling to a spelled-out intertextually saturated written definition, throughout moments, situational settings, and communicative formations. Our main conclusion from our theoretically underpinned analysis is that Martin's idea in fact only exists in (or rather: *as*) these forms of realization. The linguistic means that are mobilized during the trajectory between these realizations ebb and advance, depending on the addressivity constellation and the grade of objectification that is reached in each moment. Looking at this formative process, we argue that thinking is social, embodied, multimodal, and dialogically organized *because* it is entangled with language. It is related to others in the social sphere, it is enacted for communicative and cognitive purposes, and it is embodied because of the various language forms it takes, which show different grades of publicness, of formal expansion, and of semantic condensation. Ideas come into being by becoming uttered and addressed to self and others in culturally and historically specific language practices, thusly made objective and public, while staying fundamentally intertwined with other forms of embodiment.

#### DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The datasets for this manuscript are not publicly available because the publication of full interview transcripts from qualitative doctoral dissertation studies is not common in Germany. The full German transcript from the original study is available on

#### REFERENCES


request to interested researchers. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to AK, andrea.karsten@upb.de.

#### ETHICS STATEMENT

All names occurring in the material are pseudonyms. As per applicable institutional and national guidelines and regulations, an ethics approval was not required for the original study (Karsten, 2014a). Participants in that study gave written informed consent for research participation and publication of data and case descriptions.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

AK and M-CB wrote the manuscript. AK designed and carried out the prior study, from which data were re-analyzed.


R. van der Veer and T. Prout (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), 99–174. (Original work published in 1930).

Yakubinsky, L. P. (1997). On dialogic speech. (translated by M. Eskin). *PMLA* 112, 243–256. (Original work published in 1923). doi: 10.2307/463093

**Conflict of Interest:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Karsten and Bertau. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# The Entanglements of Affect and Participation

#### Pirkko Raudaskoski\* and Charlotte Marie Bisgaard Klemmensen

Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

The purpose of the article is to elaborate on the scholarly debate on affect. We consider the site of affect to be the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: "Affective activity is a form of social practice" (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as a social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. Moreover, we suggest that to consider affect a social ontology connects affect to agency. We regard affect as a participants' phenomenon where emotions and knowledge are not separated, i.e., as a social epistemology. To capture the complexity of affective activity, the study of situated participation requires video data. We collected data at a center for persons with acquired brain injury (ABI), which highlights research ethics. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society. We turn ICF's abstract societal perspective on participation to meaningful local accomplishments in lived social practices. Our focus is, in line with a critical social ontology in disability studies, on how-ability, the communicative abilities of the residents (Hughes, 2007). To get closer to life situations as they unfold, we analyze participation in its details as embodied actions during activities in the material environment of the center. To conclude, we demonstrate a resident's competent participation in an occupational therapy session through a fine-grained analysis of affective activity. Interaction, practices, and phenomena are complex theoretical and practical issues. In the analysis of the encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations, we use an extended version of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) that incorporates the body and material environment with the interconnectedness of interactional episodes. To do this, we enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. In the indicated work we draw on theoretical (lamination) and methodological (nexus analysis) suggestions in order to best pursue the sociocultural nature of situated interactions.

Keywords: affect, emergence, disability, participation, relationality, social practice

# THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society (World Health Organization [WHO], 2001, 2013). However, ICF lacks the important perspective of local social interplay of participation. The main purpose of the article

#### Edited by:

Vivian Afi Abui Dzokoto, Virginia Commonwealth University, United States

#### Reviewed by:

Kyoko Murakami, University of Bath, United Kingdom James Cresswell, Ambrose University, Canada

> \*Correspondence: Pirkko Raudaskoski pirkko@hum.aau.dk

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 27 February 2019 Accepted: 29 November 2019 Published: 13 December 2019

#### Citation:

Raudaskoski P and Klemmensen CMB (2019) The Entanglements of Affect and Participation. Front. Psychol. 10:2815. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02815

is to provide an example of a method that can empirically capture the central postulate of affect as social practice: How here-and-now affective activities, including practices, places, and persons are entangled with the past. By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. We hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion about methodology, with two main purposes. First, we aim at creating a deeper awareness of affect as social practice, that is, as local, embodied participation with intended or unintended consequences. Second, we hope to inform the methodology of affect studies. This is why we at the end of this article give an illustrative analysis of embodied participation in social encounters. The analysis can be enhanced by considering social encounters as complex, emergent multimodal and -sensorial situations that are entangled with "larger" sociocultural meaning making. Furthermore, we illustrate how language, body, and the material environment are used as resources in these entangled affective activities.

The "turn to affect" that has prevailed in the theoretical discussion across fields in humanities and social sciences, psychology included, has started a methodological debate based on the ontological nature of affect. One direction considers affect as something that is hard to detect with traditional "representational" methods (e.g., Blackman and Venn, 2010) whereas the other direction argues that affect can be regarded as an embodied undertaking by participants in ongoing social practices (Wetherell, 2015). We tackle affect as an inherent part of the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: "Affective activity is a form of social practice" (Schatzki, 2001; Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). We find that this interest coincides with the paradigmatic developments, not least among feminists, that focus on relationality and materiality. For instance, Barad (2007) and Haraway (2004) wrote about the ongoing realization of the world that is entangled with a plethora of other people and entities, situations, and places, both past and future. We want to take these theoretical premises as our point of departure when we study the participation of residents with acquired brain injury (ABI) from the point of view of their competencies, that is, as how-ability (Raudaskoski, 2013) and integrational proficiency (Harris, 2009; cf. Klemmensen, 2018). We find that our take on the affect turn resonates well with critical social ontology in disability studies (Hughes, 2007). Following this, we will empirically illustrate the potential of persons with ABI through a close analysis of competent participation by a resident who challenges the ongoing reality production (cf. Potter, 1996) through affective activity. Therefore, not only do we want to exemplify a methodology for undertaking affect studies but also hope to contribute to the development of tools to investigate disability and care. Advancements in disability studies help enhance the quality of life of impaired individuals through awareness of the socio-affective consequences of social practices.

As communication scholars, our empirical research interest in situated action as emergent and entangled matches the theoretical interest of affect scholars within psychology. We put forward a possible way to analyze evolving interactions as assemblage and emergence, the central concepts of the affect turn, also in psychology. With assemblage, the nature of affect as a complex relational phenomenon is accentuated, as it includes a multitude of effects of past assemblages. With emergence, the processual aspect of the ongoing situation as an assemblage drawing on past assemblages is foregrounded (cf. Wetherell, 2015). There seems to be two different foci in understanding the connection between affect and assemblage in psychology. One approach regards the ongoing intertwining of bodies, practices, and timescales as assemblages of internal bodily sensations (Blackman and Venn, 2010), whereas the other approach considers assemblages as detectable in social practices (Wetherell, 2012). In the latter approach, participants express themselves through embodied and discursive action as other-oriented beings and interpret others holistically; they exhibit situated social epistemology.

# AFFECT AS SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY – CONSEQUENCES FOR METHODOLOGY

In our view, affect as social ontology helps depict the subtle consequences of psychologically, materially, and temperospatially shared aspects of human interaction. In cultural psychology, a central interest is processuality that manifests in social practices: "Descriptions, accounts, narratives, and other kinds of discourses acquire a substantive role in the recursive constitution of diverse social practices (that is to say, in its ontology)." (Campos et al., 1999). However, we find that the focus in cultural psychology has been more on individual sayings and doings, rather than the interactional constitution of those practices.

The psychologist Lisa Blackman criticizes a discursive approach to affect and emphasizes affect as an entangled bodily phenomenon; the starting point is the internal experiencer. Both Blackman and the discourse analyst and social psychologist Margaret Wetherell regard the entanglement of emotion, and thus affect, as a habitual and shared inclination (cf. James, 1950). Notwithstanding this, recent studies emphasize the complexity of the connections between people, pasts, encounters, and materiality as emerging through participation in the situation at hand, and its unique situatedness in time and space (Wetherell, 2012; Blackman, 2013). Blackman and Venn (2010) foreground that a new ontology is on the rise, dismissing the strict division into different scientific and scholarly fields. We are in the beginning of an epistemological shift toward challenging the traditional polarities, for instance, the social and the natural, and the cognitive and the affective [cf. Barad's (2007) ethicoonto-epistem-ology]. This paper contributes to the ongoing quest to come up with research methods that match these openings. One way to tackle this is through multimodal interaction studies of situated participation (cf. Wetherell, 2013). We do this from the perspective of "social," as we concentrate on how to empirically capture the subtle influences of the past and present in the complexity of social practice. Analytically

this means that we start with the event, rather than affect (Wetherell, 2015):

Rather than affect per se on a pedestal, as the topic, we can become interested in a multi-modal situated event, in a consequential set of sequences in social, cultural, and institutional life, and make connections between the emotional performances and other ordering and organizing constituents. (p. 159)

We argue that we can answer Wetherell's call by studying affect with a methodological framework from practice and interaction studies. This allows us to investigate the complex assemblage or entanglement of emotion, materiality, and historicity in a study focusing on situated, multimodal meaning-making practices. In sum, we consider affect as social and embodied when it travels as a bodily phenomenon (Blackman, 2012, p. 15). As mentioned above, our situated doings are always an assemblage of past, present, and future. Wetherell's idea of a practice-oriented affect focuses on the many past influences present in a situation. We combine this position with ethnomethodology's focus on social order as a local accomplishment (Garfinkel, 1984) in which the past is present implicitly through the participants' understanding of and acting according to the gestalt they figure any situation to be (see e.g., Emirbayer and Maynard, 2011). To be able to do this, the participant has to have previous experiences with similar situations. Thus, we consider affect an inherently relational phenomenon that is detectable within and between situations of social interaction (e.g., Raudaskoski, 2017b). The ongoing social practices witness the affective labor with which the participants show their (dis-)affiliations in the situation as a sense-making event. It is this social epistemology, the ongoing constitution of correct versions of the world, that we try analytically to capture in its details.

# AFFECT AS EMERGENCE AND ASSEMBLAGE – METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

Both Blackman and Wetherell call for an interdisciplinary approach to investigate human interaction as practices of meaning-making by shifting focus to a perspective which foregrounds emergent, inherently indeterminate multimodal and -sensorial action organized as emergent assemblages. What connects Blackman and Wetherell is that both refer to an understanding of affect as a complex assemblage. Wetherell affect's assemblage is more like Latour's use of it (e.g., "action at distance"; how materialities and practices from other times and places influence the present), while Blackman resorts to an earlier, in psychological research dismissed, version of "action at distance" that is even harder to show empirically (e.g., telepathy). Blackman (2008) resurrects Bergson and other vitalists in the relational affect studies of experience (cf. Brown and Reavey, 2015). Blackman criticizes science studies and cultural theory for treating the body as a separate neurobiological entity to be affected. This understanding of body detaches the emergent aspect of affect and campaigns fixity rather than plasticity and emergence (Blackman, 2013, pp. 196–197). Blackman (2008) demonstrates how sense-making has been traditionally conceptualized as a work of thought and talk, and, therefore, the importance of embodiment and action has been overlooked. One of the authors of the present article has pointed out earlier how this inclination toward mind–body duality has been also problematized in bordering fields (e.g., Enfield and Sidnell, 2017; Hutton, 2017). Of greater importance is the notion of integration of past–present–future: A distinct human feature, according to Harris (2008) conceptualized as an activity, and not a work of thought:

Everything we do as human beings involve the integration of the present with the past and the future: this is temporal integration. The past we can only remember and the future we can only anticipate. But unless we could relate the hereand-now to both of these, our lives would not be those of human beings (.) human beings communicate with one another not by exchanging thoughts but by integrating their many activities. (p. 111)

Even if the importance of haptic perception, actions, and the body are increasingly in focus in processual meaning-making studies, talk and sequentiality still tend to be the methodological focus (Klemmensen, 2018). Klemmensen (2018) claims that linguistic competency is the focus in most logopedic studies with impaired individuals. However, studies in affect would suggest practices, emergences, and entanglements as social ontology and preferred analytical focus. In line with the position put forward with critical social ontology in disability studies, we consider it more ethical in the study of vulnerable subjects to broaden the perspective and have embodied action more in focus.

Important for our methodological considerations, Wetherell (2015) argues that affect is occasioned (plasticity and flexibility) and it is historical, encompassing "the human work involved in being emotional and being affected, in parsing and categorizing affective states, and the exquisite, highly complex intersections between body states, methods of registering and describing these, and the context." (p. 146). In an empirical study of affect, the assemblic and intertwined nature of emergent practices demands more careful attention than, for example, tracing the various developments and formations of activity types or their resources in longitudinal EMCA studies (Doehler et al., 2018). This is why we situate our approach to affective methodology in an interdisciplinary field informed by interaction studies and practice studies, the interest of which also lies in the manifold connectivities between practices. Since EMCA requires proof for any analytical claims from the data, affect as interpersonal emotion or narrative is mainly researched through the sequential responses to a participant's talk and action, instead of making claims and guesses about the intention of the speaker. A fairly recent collection of papers with an EMCA approach to emotions as embodied actions can be found, for example, in Peräkylä and Sorjonen's (2012) edited collection. Affective activity includes clear emotional displays, but the social practices that can be considered and analyzed as affective experiences.

These can be of more varied types such as diversely expressed intensities in interaction.

To study affect as the subtle influences of past and present in the complexity of social practice requires a further development of methodologies that appreciate the situated accomplishment of action as an assemblic undertaking. Affect is not an ephemeral entity, but constantly configures and reconfigures actions as they unfold. In other words, affect is entangled with participation, which "refers to actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk." (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004, p. 222). Wetherell (2013) takes Goodwin's (2006) work as a prime example of how to trace affect in social interaction. Marjorie H. and Charles Goodwin were among the first in the EMCA community that understood the significance of not just sequential analysis, but the analysis of the participants' actions as embodied, often simultaneous undertakings with talk, in material environments. For instance, Charles Goodwin demonstrated already long time ago the importance of analyzing contributions to interaction as relational, as being shaped by the other participants, also during a participant's contribution (Goodwin, 1979). We apply their extended version of EMCA that incorporates the body and material environment with the sociohistorical nature of interactions in order to approach encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations. To offer a methodology that serves affective activity as both emergent and assemblic, we find it necessary to enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. EMCA studies rarely pursue an analysis of the sociohistorical nature of situated interactions. Since we explore an interdisciplinary field, we study not only close, multimodal, and nuanced analysis of affective activities (cf. Goodwin et al., 2012; Wetherell, 2015; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018) but we also trace their mutual connections over time. For the present paper, this enables us to shed light upon how-ability (Raudaskoski, 2013) of the participation by impaired individuals as competent laminating to the ongoing overall activity, which means that we also analyze their observable integrational proficiency (Klemmensen, 2018).

# METHODOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENTS

We want to trace affect from local complex entanglements in the evolving interactions. However, instead of only closely examining various episodes of talk and action as evidence of affect, we want to see how various episodes connect in order to open up the theoretical entanglements for our analytical gaze. As indicated above, we prefer Wetherell's methodological approach to affect as it presupposes empirically observable social practices and encourages to follow affective activities as they are formed through bodies in social interaction with each other and the material environment. Goodwin (2013, 2018) work captures the processuality of the material–semiotic environment. Its description of the emergent entanglement (lamination) of "materials" in interaction has theoretical connections to the notion of ontology in practice theory (Schatzki et al., 2001). Goodwin defines "materials" with a sociocultural understanding as entities from the past, whether the immediately preceding one (e.g., turn-at-talk) or (tools) from other time-spaces (see the next section for a more thorough introduction to the concept of lamination). The notion of contextual configuration (Goodwin, 2000) helps analyze the moment-for-moment composing of these materials in practical action. As discussed by Klemmensen (2018), practice theorist Schatzki's inclination toward Heidegger and Wittgenstein's ideas of emergence allows a close description of multiple timescales formulated as "indeterminacy" in social events (Schatzki, 2013). This view of the social event as an endless multiparty concerted semiosis of social practices is in accordance with both Goodwin's and Schatzki's view of social events as situations emerging from certain pasts and being under construction, in other words, indeterminate social actions. According to ethnomethodology, indeterminacies get temporarily fixed in the unfolding action for the participants to be able to do things in practice.

Schatzki (1997) advocates a practice agenda in social ontology, which fits well with our framing of affect as social practice and, therefore, participation. Schatzki's (1997) concept of teleoaffectivity accentuates the ongoing relevance of any practice:

By teleoaffectivity, I mean orientations toward ends and how things matter. What a person does is largely dependent on the things for the sake of which she is prepared to act, how she is oriented toward proceeding for them, and how things matter to her. (p. 302)

Schatzki (2001) discusses social practices from the perspective of teleoaffectivity, as always being evaluable in relation to their acceptability or correctness. Furthermore, the ongoing evaluation of concrete action as acceptable or not comes close to an ethnomethodological understanding of morality and norms as ongoing accomplishments that can, therefore, be regarded as affective activity.

Wetherell's (2013) affect stance also draws from practice theory's processual focus. Our methodological choice comes very close to that of Wetherell's yet takes it further by concentrating more on the intricacies of analysis. Especially, the details of the rhizomatic nature of the entanglements draw our methodological attention. Affect becomes observable in people's participation, in their interactive work. In the present data we concentrate on special cases of teleoaffectivity – how counterclaims are managed as participation concerning mattering and acceptability. Wetherell's position makes it possible for the present authors to approach affect from their two slightly differing foci on interaction and meaning making in general: (1) trying to understand an individual's experiences (Nielsen, 2015; Klemmensen, 2018) and (2) trying to understand affect as an embodied, place-based, nuanced practice (Raudaskoski, 2010, 2016, 2017a, 2018). Klemmensen (2018) has introduced an interdisciplinary perspective to the tracing of practices over time in an analysis that outlines a person-centered approach to interaction with aphasia and ABI. Raudaskoski (2010) has analyzed affect as social practice from a telephone call about a child-in-referral to adoptive parents. Her papers from 2016 and

2018 extend the discussion on affect with a special reference to Blackman and Wetherell in relation to sociomateriality (also developed in 2017b; video data from a nature hike), and in relation to imagination, morality, and norms (video data from two TV interviews).

In sum, our methodology incorporates Wethrell's approach to affective activity as social practice with Schatzki's (2002) practice theoretical definition of teleoaffectivity and Goodwin's co-operative action. Schatzki's approach is helpful in grasping how affect is entangled with past actions and the assemblic present. However, it does not provide an interaction-based methodological framework to analyze teleoaffectivity as a phenomenon of situated "site of the social" (2002), nor does Schatzki indicate how to follow connections. We, therefore, find it useful to combine Goodwin's and Scahtzki's approaches with Scollon and Scollon's (2004) nexus analysis (NA), an empirical framework for sociocultural analysis that provides a methodology for tracing social practices.

# LAMINATED ACTION

In order to grasp better the sociocultural traceability or historicity of emergences in empirical data, we first turn to Goodwin's concept of laminated action (2013):

Individual actions are constructed by assembling diverse materials, including language structure, prosody, and visible embodied displays. Semiotically charged objects, such as maps, when included within local action, incorporate ways of knowing and acting upon the world that have been inherited from predecessors. New action is built by performing systematic, selective operations on these public configurations of resources. (p. 8)

Lamination covers the here-and-now, and the moment-formoment-building of other-oriented action, but also the pasts that are present in situated action, semiotically and materially as the substrate to which the present action contributes. To study lamination, we explore how various types of doings and sayings in material settings constitute contextual configurations through various constellations of "semiotic fields" (e.g., language, body, and artifacts). By decomposition and reuse of material from previous turns, experiences, and expectations accumulate and constitute knowledge as the product of humans co-operating (Goodwin, 2018). Yet, Goodwin's lamination functions at two, fairly separate levels: (1) the local, turn by turn building of interaction in which the previous turn can work as "substrate." In this local co-operative building of meaning, (2) materials from predecessors point at longer timescales and practices. However, we want to inspect lamination as a phenomenon in between these two timescales as a process. We want to detect and follow the development of issues that matter as embodied undertakings. In our case an important trace is the embodied, situated (as activity and material setting) production of counterclaims. We are interested in a methodology that can follow the episodes of interactions in order to describe how they connect to each other. Thus, methodologically, we apply relationality by developing a data-driven method of tracing affective entanglements from longer stretches of interaction. This is where we turn to NA.

# ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

In order to approach the relationality of affective assemblages, NA (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) serves as our general framework. NA shares the same theoretical and methodological interests as Goodwin's lamination. It is an ethnographic approach that provides a possibility to combine close interaction studies with an understanding of the historicity of the ongoing action (Scollon and Scollon, 2004, 2007). NA is a framework for doing mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Scollon, 2001), which, with its focus on embodiment and materiality has resemblances to Goodwin's (2000) contextual configuration (cf. Raudaskoski, 2010). NA regards social actions in a situated activity (nexus of practice) as a most important focus. The analysis starts with nexus of practice, which often is a habitual and recognizable activity (interaction order) and always an intersection of place-bound (cp. Casey, 1987) discourses (discourses in place) and participants (historical bodies) – all with past histories. How far in the sociocultural past the researcher goes with data analysis (circumferencing) depends on what is being investigated. Therefore, NA – as also discussed by the practice studies researcher Nicolini (2012) – provides a practice-based framework for analyzing entanglements or assemblages, also affect and agency, as rhizomatic. This type of study goes beyond discursive discrepancies or interactional dissonance as strictly local occasions, and focuses on relationality and participation as consequential (Larsen and Raudaskoski, 2016; Klemmensen, 2018).

Nexus analysis, combined with contextual configuration, provides a framework that makes possible a close analysis of ongoing action with connections to other times. In sum, the enrichment is that it affords traceability by following the actions, not just stating the connections between them and other times. NA is, therefore, to be considered the methodological answer to Wetherell's description of affective practice: "An affective practice like a dancing plague recruits material objects, institutions, pasts and anticipated futures. But the main things that an affective practice folds or composes together are bodies and meaningmaking." (Wetherell, 2012, p. 20).

# EMPIRICAL DATA

In order to show how we have operationalized the above methodological constructs, we now turn to our illustrative empirical analysis. During 2012–2013 we carried out a pilot project about inclusion and exclusion in an ABI institution/home setting. In order to observe (and participate in) the everyday life of people with ABI, we paid a series of fieldwork visits to a care home facility in Northern Denmark. Five visits over 3 months formed the core pilot project. The pedagogical principle of the center is social inclusion (cf. ICF framework) that is conceived as the enhancement of the residents' possibilities to be part of social situations. We wanted to research how inclusion as a popular

concept in care was practiced in the center, and what kind of exclusions could be detected. In the same way as words can be ethnomethodologically seen as approximations the meaning of which is fixed in situ, we considered whether a social practice includes or excludes depends on its local accomplishment, and not on its intended effect. This is why the overall approach was to follow lived practices as complex accomplishments of embodied participation in material settings. Data were collected through participatory fieldwork by the researchers who, while participating in the everyday activities in the center, took notes, conducted interviews, and made video recordings (cf. Jordan and Henderson, 1995; ten Have, 2004; Raudaskoski, 2015; Demuth, 2018). Combined, the data form the "core data" and supportive evidence (ten Have, 2004). For the present article we concentrate solely on the video data, as our aim is to show how multimodal video analysis of longer stretches of interaction (Goodwin, 2013, 2018) can add to the situated analysis of affective activity (Wetherell, 2015).

Our empirical video data for the present article come from a bi-weekly occupational therapeutic meeting that took place in the Competence and Culture Center (a meeting room). In addition to one stable camera (Panasonic) in the corner, two GoPros were used, one sitting on an elevated table at the front and the other one being attached on the forehead of the cameraperson. By using three video cameras we wanted to cover as much as possible of the various participants' communicative resources (cf. Raudaskoski, 2003). In our analysis, we follow how one resident skilfully fits his critical participation in the ongoing interaction and how he builds that affective engagement on his previous embodied or verbal contributions during the meeting. We follow him over the course of three exemplary excerpts that illustrate his habitual modus operandi or social behavior with the care personal and social encounters.

In line with Hughes (2007), the focus is on the residents' social abilities, rather than on their physical or cognitive disabilities (cf. Raudaskoski, 2013). At the time of recording (2012), almost exclusively all theories and research on brain injury focused on psychological and neurological issues of the brain itself. There was very little research-based understanding of the social/communicative/interactional consequences of brain injury for everyday life, even if there was some research into the possibilities of self-presentation (e.g., Hydén and Antelius, 2011). We chose to follow what went on at an everyday level of lived practice to search for indicators of which practices were inclusive and which practices led exclusion from participation. This is why in our study the residents were followed in their everyday (institutional) environment. We had open-ended access to define our research through an institutional collaboration and were not commissioned by the board of the care center. However, we discussed our initial ideas with the pedagogical leader and his manager and held a workshop at the center to share our ideas and observations during the pilot phase where staff, residents, and administration were invited and a number of researchers partook (cf. Nielsen, 2015). We also reviewed parts of our material with the occupational therapists (OTs) and the participant residents during the pilot. Both of the authors of the present article were involved in the fieldwork. We followed the general research ethical protocols from EMCA, acquiring undersigned consent forms from all the participants or their carers (in case of severe brain injury), and the participants were informed that they can at any stage revoke their permission to use the data. The form made it possible to give a detailed permission to use the anonymized data in research and teaching with reference to the initial project. As the researchers were participating in the occupational therapy situations as interested parties, instead of trying to be undisturbing observants, they were moving about freely in the same way as the other participants were. Nothing was done to hide that research took place. In other words, objectivity was regarded as closeness, not as distance (Clarke, 2005). This is why the researchers always are participants in the situations analyzed below.

Since we consider affect as social practice in which various assemblages are present, we analyze it through emergent participation. In the following, we undertake a fine-tuned analysis of participation as embodied social practices while they unfold in their material setting (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) and also how the previous occasions are present rhizomatically, popping up from "substrates" (Goodwin, 2013). We follow the EMCA principle of unmotivated looking in our striving to document how exactly the participants oriented to each other and the material surroundings; how exactly did they use language, gaze, and the body, how were the ongoing contextual configurations built to show where their attention was. This we did through including longer stretches of data and investigating relationality within and between parts of these from the embodied participation (cp. Raudaskoski, 2003). So, we aim at combining the strengths of several existing approaches to action: the Goodwinian type of close EMCA analysis (Goodwin, 2003, 2013, 2018), the practice theoretical understanding of teleoaffectivity (Schatzki, 1997), and the experiential approach as historical and layered (Scollon and Scollon, 2004; Goodwin, 2013). We find in this interdisciplinary conjunction of lamination and NA a possible methodology to analyze our data as "'composing', 'figuring', 'entangling', 'mobilising' and 'recruiting'. Something, in other words, that comes into shape and continues to change and refigure as it flows on." (Wetherell, 2012, p. 15). The inclusion of teleoaffecivity is used as a concept that helps give an explanation from the point of view of affect as disalignments and disputes which recurrently emerge.

With the present implementation of methodology the consequences of ABI to the body and its functions are investigated in an analysis of lived practices in an institutional setting.

## ANALYSIS OF AFFECTIVE ACTIVITY AS EMBODIED PARTICIPATION

We focus on one of the biweekly sessions where an OT and pedagogical staff members are always present, with a varying number of residents. The occupational therapy sessions are fairly informal gatherings without a strict procedure. The session in question took place in the Competence and Culture Center room where the residents can engage in, for instance, discussing

newspaper and magazine articles or plan future activities such as shopping and local competitions. The atmosphere in the meetings we followed were generally upbeat – there was a lot of laughter and teasing. The session in focus lasted for 2.5 h. We follow a resident when he (1) volunteers to make tea in a kitchen area before the session and again (2) back in the meeting room during the introduction to our research project and, further, (3) in a discussion about the variety of ABI as a practical problem. In these episodes (a) an OT highlights the difficulty for disabled (ABI) residents to use the building's interior design, (b) a researcher claims that people with ABI get easily tired, and (c) a discussion takes place about the center's understanding of the various types of problems people with ABI have. In the three occasions of participation we analyze how R problematizes these claims through (a<sup>0</sup> ) orienting to the skilful use of the kitchen and doing that with interactional finesse, (b<sup>0</sup> ) skilfully "teaching" the researcher about his body (spastic right arm) causing insomnia, and (c<sup>0</sup> ) highlighting the ignorance of the staff vis-à-vis his experiences in the place of care. The three foci emerged from unmotivated looking as an analytic strategy: We noticed that issues from the kitchen were taken up in different ways in the consequent meeting (in the second: ABI as disability; in the third: the concrete setting and care).

In the following, we explain briefly what has happened before each extract. Before the first extract, the researchers have been introducing the research project in the occupational therapy room. There is coffee on the table, but tea is missing, so a resident (R), an OT, and a research assistant (RA) have moved from the meeting room to the adjacent kitchen in the common area where OT and RA have agreed to make tea with R. There is humorous talk about the RA's headband with GoPro [cf. Murakami (2003) on the joint attention to a technological device in a data gathering session]. The transition to tea making takes place when OT places herself at one end of the kitchen sink while asking, through a hand gesture and subdued talk, R to go ahead. R starts moving to the sink in his wheelchair in a direct angle to the sink. The angle is such that he would not be able to reach the objects on the sink. Seeing this seems to occasion OT's critique of the interior design that she addresses to RA. This is where the extract starts (**Figure 1**).

Through turns 1–9, the OT is verbally and through gesturing highlighting the building's bad interior design, in relation to disabled individuals' participation possibilities. By doing this, the OT steps out of her role of a co-participant in tea making, as she turns to the RA and "lectures" about the bad design for wheelchair users. This way she constitutes R as a member of a general collection (a person with bodily impairment) that she is talking about, and doing that in front of R. OT verbally initiates the critique in turn 1. R rolls back in his wheelchair toward the sink to initiate the activity of making tea. R's adjusting his wheelchair to go alongside the kitchen sink is a necessarily maneuvre to reach the kettle, but as it is done in overlap with OT's talk, it could also be seen as an embodiment of her critique (cf. the analysis in Klemmensen, 2018, pp. 121–122).

In turn 11, R reaches out for the water kettle and changes the hand shape from grasp to pointing while glancing both at OT and RA. OT, who has two participation frameworks, that of speaking with RA while the trunk oriented to R, interprets R's pointing and glances as an attention seeking activity. She walks to R who talks to her with subdued voice (turn 14). While grasping the kettle from its base, and while glancing at the approaching RA, R discursively (turn 16) approaches the water kettle in a jokey fashion as the absolutely correct object. This way he laminates to the topic of the bad kitchen sink design for disabled people by transforming the topic "disability" (and kitchen sinks) to a humorous way of starting the actual tea making [cf. e.g., Mulkay (1988) on humor as problem hedging and Argaman (2015) on humor and disagreement]. We find this change of topic his way of getting the focus on him as skilful in not just how to use the (objects on the) kitchen sink, but also in his linguistic and interpersonal abilities, shown in a complex way of expressing a humorous stance. OT joins the humorous line by mock treating R's turn as information to acknowledge, telling R that his trajectory of action is correct with the kettle. While saying this, OT shows her professional orientation to the situation as practizing everyday life skills, and steps back. R has difficulties getting the lid off the kettle, and OT steps forward toward him once again (turn 19). While she is holding the kettle, R attempts to get the lid out and comments on how it will not release (20). On the cooperative use of material objects, see Raudaskoski (1997, 2000, 2003, 2006) and also the recent interest in EMCA on the topic (Nevile et al., 2014). After that, the lid gives in and drops on the surface of the sink. In duo, R and OT handle the kettle co-operatively in a co-choreographed fashion that allows R to participate in the tea preparation gradually, laminating each other's actions over turns 11–21. So the difficulty for R in the situation turns out to be – due to his spastic left arm – his inability to use both hands to get the lid off, rather than him being in the wheelchair.

Affective activity as social practice in this extract is subtle: the resident challenges the categorization made by the occupational therapy. He does that through bodily action (changing the angle of the wheelchair to the kitchen sink) and by participating in the situation in a humorous fashion. His agency is only limited by the spastic left arm.

The next extract comes from the introduction to the research project in the meeting room. RA has given each participant a sheet of paper, which explains the project and its purpose. She is standing up and reading the letter through, explaining some of the sentences with her own words. Just before the second extract (**Figure 2**) she explains – through her own experience with a family member that has had strokes – how very tired a person with ABI easily gets. R's participation is a reaction to that.

In this excerpt the resident (R) makes a counterclaim to RA's generalization about ABI as always causing tiredness. R starts his respond by locating his bodily problem first to the left wrist and then expanding it to spasticity in the whole left side (turns 1–4). He moves the left lower arm to the front of his body by grasping the right arm with it and moving the right arm to his side. He then releases the right arm to move it down the left arm when he talks about the left side (see picture in turn 1). This bodily problem is then turned into a description of his bodily state ("turned on") in turn 6. RA is showing her understanding of the description as "getting energy" of the bodily impairment by her


change of state token and affirmative feedback (turn 7). She then gives a formulation ("so you gain actually energy from it") of how she understands R's contribution. R's next turn ("all day and all night") is at the same time a continuation of his first turn and an acknowledgment of RA's formulation. RA now formulates the gist of R's further explanation (turn 10) with "so you cannot rest very well," to which R agrees with a more extreme case formulation of no longer being able to sleep.

Resident builds his counterclaim carefully. Instead of telling RA that her generalization is wrong, he builds his case about his body with his body; he laminates the talk about the problematic part of it with a demonstration or visualization. The problem with the left arm already had become noticeable with his difficulty to move the water kettle lift by right hand only. His "diagnostic work" (cf. Büscher et al., 2010) could be seen to laminate to that occasion, too, and not just as a preparation

to adjusting the claim that RA had made. By introducing the problem with the left arm and by letting RA formulate the contradictory point of view ("you cannot rest") to her previous announcement of being extremely tired, R is being highly pedagogical and, therefore, a skilful "informant." There are small acknowledging voices in addition to RA's empathetic agreement. The mood is sober.

In this extract, the affective activity is more in line with the traditional focus on private feelings as shareable emotions. The resident incrementally corrects the RA's categorybound generalization of ABI always meaning tiredness (teleoaffectivity) to him not being able to sleep because of the spastic arm.

After this, the talk goes to discussing how each and every person with ABI is a specific case. There is a long episode of talk by the researchers and staff members about each case being different, how there is no one type that people can be categorized into. After the general agreement about each individual case being different OT relates it back to "this place here" ("this is why we define this place as a specialized residence"). The first turn in the following excerpt (**Figure 3**) continues from this statement, giving her reason for it.

In turn 1, OT connects the general discussion about each brain injury being different to the residency they live and work in. R turns to OT, calling her by her name, and starts


a counterclaim in the form of a complaint (cp. Klemmensen, 2018, p. 123). R builds his complaint by giving an account of his first thoughts when he arrived to the "enormous place that has been built" in his extensive turn (turn 4), laminating his turn-at-talk with that of OT's mention of the place. He then contrasts the sophistication of the building with a lack of medical understanding of his condition. He can be seen to laminate to the situation in the kitchen (**Figure 1**) where OT criticized the interior design of the building: It is not just the building but the care given in it that is under criticism. We can detect the nervousness (intensity) of his participation in his small headshakes and the smacks that are hearably produced in a dry mouth (turn 4).

Resident is using the highly charged word "ignorance" to describe the institutional knowledge about his situation. R's contribution also laminates to the refuting of RA's claim in the previous discussion (**Figure 2**). The general formulation of "my situation," together with the extreme case formulation "complete ignorance" seems to throw OT off guard: "wha- wha-I'm uncertain what it is you mean by ignorance [name]" (turn 6).

Right after OT addresses R, R starts answering the question (turn 7), which he repeats (turn 9) after OT's subdued finishing of the sentence "by ignorance" and starting a new sentence (turn 8). In turn 8, OT suggests a postponing of the discussion, accompanied by a rapid movement of hand downward (turn 8, picture). The discarding of R's intense contribution gets a minimal response from him ("yes" in turn 9). After OT's additional "if need be," R gives a wordier confirmation, with a pointing hand (turn 10, picture), implying his eagerness to continue with the topic. OT's last turn (11) works both as a promise to not to drop the topic and not to do it in the present situation, categorizing it as not suitable or relevant for the situation at hand. After this episode, OT turns her gaze away from R. There is a fairly long silence (7 s) in relation to the pace of the interaction so far. The long silence not only ended the topic of the discussion in this continuously sustained talk (Schegloff, 2007), but the length of it confirms the exchange as a disruption to the ongoing topic. The silence is then broken by another staff member who changes the trajectory and starts talking about the practicalities of the research project.

In this extract, we have a counterclaim the production of which is a teleoaffective activity that is accompanied by the kind of affective activity that Blackman and Venn write about: The intensity of the resident's feeling is not just expressed through words, but through gestures, head shakes, and the hearably dry mouth.

We have now followed three occasions where the resident orients to (a<sup>0</sup> ) his ability to use the kitchen as a material and social space, (b<sup>0</sup> ) his body (spastic right arm) causing insomnia, and (c<sup>0</sup> ) the ignorance of the staff vis-à-vis his situation. All these embodied or verbal statements occur as next turns to (a) an OT's highlighting of the building's bad interior design, occasioned itself by the resident being in the kitchen, (b) a researcher's claim of people with ABI getting easily tired, and (c) a discussion about the organizational understanding of the various types of problems people with ABI have. The three extracts give examples of teleoaffectivity: the acceptability or correctness of the claims are challenged. In the first extract (**Figure 1**), the problem of the kitchen as a concrete space for ABI sufferers is challenged by the resident's humorous response, showing his social capacities, while he is parking his wheelchair to start making tea. However, his participation becomes cumbersome due to a spastic arm. In the second extract (**Figure 2**), the resident recruits his spastic arm as a concretization of the counterclaim to RA's claim about tiredness. In the third extract (**Figure 3**) the ignorance (cf. **Figure 2**) of the carers is laminated to the "fine" building (cf. **Figure 1**).

In doing this analysis, we have shown an example of how a nexus analytical framing – benefits from an interdisciplinary methodology to study affect as social practice. NA can show at the emergent social practice level how the conduct of individuals and collectivities emerges in an entangled fashion. This is possible because NA moves the analysis across time and space in both a forward and backward perspective, instead of being sequentially restricted as are traditional EMCA analyses.

# DISCUSSION

Affective activity is theorized as an emergent, entangled activity where the body, the material setting, the activity, and the sociocultural pasts of those intersect in emergent interaction (cf. Raudaskoski, 2003; Krummheuer, 2015; Klemmensen, 2018). The data material shows how relational affective activity develops through a series of engagements between participants. The analysis illustrates how lamination and teleoaffectivity can be used to analyze participants' participation and initiatives in interaction. We show how affect as social practice unfolds as an assemblage or entanglement of not only the ongoing talk and action with the complexity of the embodied, material, and verbal situation, but also past occasions of participation. Therefore, the study examines affect as practice over time, demonstrating its rhizomatic connections between three counterclaims. The extracts show how an "emotional blister" (Wetherell, 2012, p. 70) grows throughout well-meaning institutional interaction when the resident (R) produces three separate occasions of counterclaims.

Our paper takes its point of departure in Wetherell's (2015) recent acknowledgment of EMCA-based analysis of social practices as a way to do affect analysis. With this turn, Wetherell, who started discursive psychology with Potter as a critical discursive approach with interpretative repertoire as a main analytical tool, now comes closer to the mainstream interests of discursive psychology (e.g., Wiggins and Potter, 2007). However, while mainstream discursive psychology has kept close to the linguistic conversation analysis in its focus on the verbal production of talk as social action, Wetherell opens to more nuanced tools (Goodwins' work). Furthermore, she appreciates the theoretical considerations of affect that Blackman and Venn exemplify, but is hesitant about how the theoretical focus on intense bodily experiences can be turned into an empirical analysis. For instance, Wetherell (2012) highlights that the Deleuzian concepts of affective experiences such as force and intensity are analyzed in unaccountable ways. Notwithstanding this, our analysis shows how intensity can be analyzed as part of social practice. In the last example (**Figure 3**) the nervousness of the resident is detectable in his embodied participation: the small headshakes and dry mouth, giving a practical example of how affective bodily reactions not always are invisible, but are occasioned and detectable in embodied interaction. Also, even if the body is important for understanding affect, Wetherell (2012) finds the focus on the body as a non-conscious immediate entity excessive (p. 35). However, in our case the body does "come first," but not as an internal experiencer. Instead, R's spastic left arm becomes a topic, an issue from not being able to do a practical task (open the lid of a water kettle) to challenging outsider's generalization of ABI and tiredness (cannot sleep) to making a complaint about the institutional care.

To sum up, the scope of the present paper has been twofold. First, it is an example of affective activity as embodied participation and, second, it is a response to the call of empirical investigations on affect and does that from a multimodal and ethnomethodological perspective. It demonstrates the omnipresence and various (subtle) forms of affect in social

practice. In this way, real life communication situations are shown to be essential data to study not just affective activities, but also how bodily impairment demonstrates in institutional settings. The analysis showed not just how the resident tied to the topics of the ongoing interaction, but also laminated to the previous ones, and, finally, to a memory of his first encounter with the place. The place as a material entity, both as a topic and as a setting of the interaction, was thus laminated to his managing a change of direction in the discussion. It demonstrated the complex relationality of interaction practices and especially counterclaims as teleoaffective activity. In other words, with a nexus analytical framing: The occurrence of cascading responses distributed over several situations shows how a resident (R) uses his experiences (cp. historical body) throughout sessions involving the researcher (RA) and OT (cp. interaction order), connecting the topic about the interior design of the institution (**Figure 1**) to a complaint about his treatment there (cp. discourses in place) (**Figure 3**).

# CONCLUSION

Our objective has been to contribute to the methodological toolkit for empirical studies of affective activity, with data from a disability context. The theorization of affect as entanglement and emergence inspired us to investigate affective activity as lived practice. We started with a discussion about two diverging approaches to affect within psychology. The first considers affect a non-cognitive bodily phenomenon (e.g., Blackman and Venn, 2010), while the second conceptualizes affect as emerging social practice (e.g., Wetherell, 2013). We chose the side of "social" in the debate between their positions.

By treating affective activity as a form of social practice in situated human interaction, we considered affect as a social ontology A social ontology also included investigating the social event as an assemblic movement across sequences. In that work we resorted to a combination of methodological tools from ethnomethodology and practice studies guided by a nexus analytical framing, which uncovered the experiential as situated place-based, material, sociocultural participation: we used contextual configuration, lamination, and NA. With these methods, the subtlety of affect could be demonstrated in an illustrative empirical analysis as a social, bodily phenomenon which is entangled with practices over time and space.

In sum, the complex theme of affect as emergent social practice requires a methodology with which the converging theoretical interests of different traditions can be served and the entanglements of affect and participation can be empirically researched. We find it important that we undertake research that can help not just understand affect and participation as theoretical or empirical questions, but can contribute to things that matter. Our empirical analysis was an attempt at that: We showed the skilful or proficient use of initiative and memory by a resident in a care center for ABI where many are diagnosed as having problems with exactly those. A single-case design is idiographic in content but with the fine-grained analysis of one participant, we show not just this particular resident's skills but how the situations studied are entangled with various pasts, present, and future anticipatory participation.

We have shown with an analysis of a resident's affective activity as social practice how inclusion and exclusion are not either or phenomena, but always recurring and accomplished through occasioned participation in the ongoing flow of institutional practices. Thus, in addition to exemplifying a methodology for doing affect studies, we aim to contribute in the development of tools to investigate disability and care and hereby enhance the quality of life of impaired individuals through awareness of the socio-affective consequences of social practices. We hope that increased attention toward interactional accomplishments will help develop our understanding of disability and its many social aspects (Raudaskoski, 2013; Krummheuer, 2015; Klemmensen, 2018). This is in accordance with the ICF-model from the WHO that promotes a disability conceptualization that focuses on participation, and, finally, it invokes a societal understanding of disability beyond a bio-based deficiency perspective (World Health Organization [WHO], 2001, 2013; Klemmensen, 2018, p. 32).

# DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The datasets for this manuscript are not publicly available because to protect the anonymity of the participants. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to the Aalborg University Research Integrity Office.

# ETHICS STATEMENT

At the time of the study, an approval from an ethics committee was not a requirement. The study was conducted according to the Aalborg University research ethics guidelines and the Danish data protection regulations. Written informed consent was given from all the participant subjects in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Further details of the ethical procedure are explained in the article. Furthermore, legal bystanders validated consent given by those individuals that were legally deauthorized.

# AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The authors contributed in collaboration to the writing of this article on the basis of their earlier research on the topic.

# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the participant subjects from our study for allowing us to gain insight into their lived worlds. We are also grateful and thank the two reviewers for their most valuable comments. This has improved our work and motivation greatly in the process of finalizing the article.

# REFERENCES


Blackman, L. (2008). The Body: the Key Concepts. New York, NY: Berg.


Garfinkel, H. (1984). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.



**Conflict of Interest:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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