What affects you? A conversation analysis of exploring emotions during reflection sessions in Dutch general practitioner training.

Introduction: In Dutch training for general practitioners (GPs), reflection on professional practice is key to their training. Such reflection is considered beneficial for professional development, especially when it entails discussing the emotional dimension of practice experiences. In the GP context, invitations to share the emotional side of things, such as "how did that make you feel?" are considered functional; yet, they are also sometimes viewed by participants as 'grilling', 'just too much' or 'too intimate'. Put shortly, putting emotions on the table is institutionally embedded in the GP reflection context, but not always straightforward. Thus, we ask: 'how do teachers and GP residents invite talk about emotions in educational reflection sessions?'. Methods: In this study, we explored the Dutch phrase 'raken, geraakt worden' (being affected) as one interactional practice used to initiate emotion talk. We conducted a conversation analytic collection study of instances of this phenomenon based on 40 video recordings of hour-long 'reflection sessions' at the Dutch GP specialty training. During these sessions, approximately ten GPs in training discuss recent experiences from medical practice under supervision of one or two teachers. Results: We found that participants orientated to the relevance of 'being affected' as a topic for discussion. Variations of the form 'what affects you now?' may contribute to putting emotions on the table; they can project a stepwise exploration of the emotional dimension of an experience. The 'what affects you now', often done in interrogative format doing a noticing, in combination with a request, is a powerful tool to instigate transformative sequences. The form is less effective to put emotions on the table when the topic shift it initiates is not grounded in previously presented personal stakes or displayed emotion. Discussion: The study's findings show how detailed interactional analysis of one sequentially structured practice can benefit education and contribute to theory on emotions and reflection. The mobilizing power of 'what affects you' can serve institutional purposes by doing topical work in relation to educational aims, while its power can also be deflated when prior talk does not project the relevance of unpacking the emotional dimension of an experience. Its interactional workings may translate to other helping contexts as well.

Unraveling Chinese talk about emotion.

Research in cross-cultural psychiatry has asserted that Chinese people have a higher tendency to report somatic symptoms of their psychological distress than people with a European ethnic background. However, recent studies have reached inconsistent conclusions and most have confounded language use with culture in their study designs. Focusing on the varying degrees of orientation to Chinese culture, the present study examined the words freely listed by two Chinese groups of university students (mainland Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese) when describing their illness experience. Words were categorized into somatic, emotion, and somatic-emotion clusters. Overall, the Chinese participants were more willing to talk about their emotions than their somatic symptoms in an anonymous survey. The enculturated mainland Chinese participants-who reported greater Chinese cultural identity-used significantly more emotion words but fewer somatic-emotion words than the Hong Kong Chinese participants. No group differences were found in somatic words. In contrast to previous findings, the current study failed to find support for the relationship between orientation to Chinese culture and somatic symptom reporting when controlling for language use.

Parent Emotion Talk with Preschoolers from Low-Income Mexican American and Chinese American Families: Links to Sociocultural Factors.

Emotion talk (ET), an emotion socialization practice theorized to promote children's emotion understanding and emotion regulation, has been linked to better socioemotional adjustment in diverse samples. Immigrant children face developmentally unique challenges and opportunities related to their multi-lingual and multi-cultural experiences. The present study aimed to identify sociocultural correlates of parent ET in two groups of low-income immigrant families with preschool-age children: Mexican American (MA) and Chinese American (CA) families. In 90 parent-child dyads (child age = 38 to 70 months, 59% girls; 46 Mexican American and 44 Chinese American) recruited from Head Start programs, parents' (mostly mothers') ET quality and quantity (i.e., use of emotion words, emotion questions and explanations, and overall elaborateness of ET) were coded from verbal transcripts of a shared picture book reading task. First, we found similarities and differences in ET across the two groups. Both MA and CA parents used emotion words, emotion questions, and emotion reasoning, whereas linking the story to personal emotion experience was infrequent. MA parents used more negative emotion words, emotion reasoning, and engaged in more elaborate ET than CA parents. Second, we examined the unique relations of multiple socio-cultural factors (SES, cultural orientations, parent and child demographics) to parent ET. Parent education and child age were associated positively with emotion questions, income was associated positively with emotion reasoning, and parents' heritage culture orientation was associated positively with the elaborateness of ET. The findings highlight the need to consider socio-cultural variations in emotion socialization practices when adapting and disseminating socioemotional learning interventions.

Framing a 'social problem': Emotion in anti-abortion activists' depiction of the abortion debate.

Social psychological research on activism typically focuses on individuals' social identifications. We complement such research through exploring how activists frame an issue as a social problem. Specifically, we explore anti-abortion activists' representation of abortion and the abortion debate's protagonists so as to recruit support for the anti-abortion cause. Using interview data obtained with UK-based anti-abortion activists (N = 15), we consider how activists characterized women having abortions, pro-abortion campaigners, and anti-abortion campaigners. In particular, we consider the varied ways in which emotion featured in the representation of these social actors. Emotion featured in different ways. Sometimes, it was depicted as constituting embodied testament to the nature of reality. Sometimes, it was depicted as blocking the rational appraisal of reality. Our analysis considers how such varied meanings of emotion shaped the characterization of abortion and the abortion debate's protagonists such that anti-abortion activists were construed as speaking for women and their interests. We discuss how our analysis of the framing of issues as social problems complements and extends social psychological analyses of activism.

Happy faces, sad faces: Emotion understanding in toddlers and preschoolers with language impairments.

BACKGROUND: The capacity for emotion recognition and understanding is crucial for daily social functioning. We examined to what extent this capacity is impaired in young children with a Language Impairment (LI). In typical development, children learn to recognize emotions in faces and situations through social experiences and social learning. Children with LI have less access to these experiences and are therefore expected to fall behind their peers without LI. METHOD: In this study, 89 preschool children with LI and 202 children without LI (mean age 3 years and 10 months in both groups) were tested on three indices for facial emotion recognition (discrimination, identification, and attribution in emotion evoking situations). Parents reported on their children's emotion vocabulary and ability to talk about their own emotions. RESULTS: Preschoolers with and without LI performed similarly on the non-verbal task for emotion discrimination. Children with LI fell behind their peers without LI on both other tasks for emotion recognition that involved labelling the four basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, fear). The outcomes of these two tasks were also related to children's level of emotion language. IMPLICATIONS: These outcomes emphasize the importance of 'emotion talk' at the youngest age possible for children with LI.

Gender and age differences in parent-child emotion talk.

This study examined gender differences in emotion word use during mother-child and father-child conversations. Sixty-five Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.50, SD = 3.54) and 6-year-old (M = 77.07, SD = 3.94) children participated in this study. Emotion talk was examined during a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Mothers mentioned a higher proportion of emotion words than did fathers. During the play-related storytelling task, mothers of 4-year-old daughters mentioned a higher proportion of emotion words than did mothers of 4-year-old sons, whereas fathers of 4-year-old daughters directed a higher proportion of emotion words than did fathers of 4-year-old sons during the reminiscence task. No gender differences were found with parents of 6-year-old children. During the reminiscence task daughters mentioned more emotion words with their fathers than with their mothers. Finally, mothers' use of emotion talk was related to whether children used emotion talk in both tasks. Fathers' use of emotion talk was only related to children's emotion talk during the reminiscence task.

Spanish parents' emotion talk and their children's understanding of emotion.

Relations between parent-child emotion talk and children's emotion understanding were examined in 63 Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.35 months, SD = 3.86) and 6-year-old (M = 76.62 months, SD = 3.91) children. Parent-child emotion talk was analyzed during two storytelling tasks: a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Children's emotion understanding was assessed twice through a standardized test of emotion comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004), once before one of the two parent-child storytelling sessions and again 6 months later. Mothers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task predicted children's emotion understanding after controlling for children's previous emotion understanding. Whereas fathers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task was correlated with children's emotion understanding, it did not predict children's emotion understanding after controlling for previous emotion understanding. Implications of these findings for future research on children's socioemotional development are discussed.