Emotionography Theory, Research, and Practice

How does emotion arise in everyday settings? How can it be studied in the real world?

In this book, authors Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn offer their distinctive approach to the study of emotion. Emotionography explores emotion not through scales, experiments, or interviews, but as it actually occurs in natural interactions. Drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, the authors’ detailed analytic toolkit for representing talk, timing, and conduct makes visible how emotion is displayed, oriented to, and managed moment by moment. Step-by-step case examples show how crying and upset, laughter, and anger can be understood from an emotionographic perspective.

Emotion is live, consequential, and interactional, and it can be studied with a level of accuracy that also has practical bite. Emotionography shows how the ways people display and describe feelings shape what others do next, including how they respond, align, resist, comfort, escalate, or redirect. That matters in everyday life, and it matters in high-stakes settings such as helplines, emergency calls, healthcare, and counselling. Emotionography offers practitioners a way to refine how they respond in real time, and offers researchers a rigorous analytic alternative to treating emotion as a private inner state.

Jonathan Potter, DPhil, is professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Dr. Potter is one of the founders of discursive psychology which focuses on how careful analyses of interaction can be a route to the understanding and sometimes even reworking of basic psychological questions. Throughout his research career, Dr. Potter has addressed fundamental issues of theory and method, and he has made substantial research contributions in the area of language and racism, the operation of helplines, family interaction, and the way emotion and cognition operate in communication. He a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, a fellow of the International Communication Association and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Alexa Hepburn, PhD, is professor emerita of communication at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She has published widely on the science of human interaction, as well as on developments in discursive and critical psychology. Dr. Hepburn’s research focuses on the use and development of conversation analytic methods, including the notation and analysis of emotional expression within social interaction; the interactional role of interrogatives such as tag questions; parents’ strategies for managing their children’s behavior; and the empirical grounding of these interests in everyday interaction. Her work highlights limitations in more traditional perspectives on emotion and influence, and supports applied work in professional client encounters including medical consultations, and helpline interactions. Dr. Hepburn also continues to develop and deliver training workshops to practitioners.