Cover not available

In:How Emotions Are Made in Talk
Edited by Jessica S. Robles and Ann Weatherall
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 321] 2021
► pp. 263–286

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 3.4
Affect and accountability

Pain displays as a resource for action

ORCiD logo with link | University of California Los Angeles
Published online: 12 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.321.10mca
Abstract
Hesitance among conversation analysts and other interaction scholars to explicitly link pain with emotion may stem from a conceptual dualism separating the body from the mind that has underpinned much work on emotion. Focusing on pain displays in primary care physical exams, I investigate the boundaries of this divide. I argue that pain displays allow speakers to accomplish actions ‘off-record’ that might otherwise be seen as socially or interactionally problematic. The social mechanism (i.e. the societal ‘cogs and wheels’) underlying this interactional affordance is the same one underlying displays of emotion. Affective displays work because, although they are observably controllable, they are oriented to as automatic reactions rather than accountable actions. This study joins other work in the sociology of pain to shed light on what it means for pain to be at least partially an ‘emotion in a social context.’ Without pain’s affective component – that is, without our view that a person displays pain because they are suffering – pain would cease to be the action-oriented resource it is.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The ontology of pain: Physical sensation or emotion?
    • 2.2From ontology to interaction
    • 2.3Pain displays as an action-oriented resource
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Freestanding pain displays
    • 4.2Turn-initial pain displays
    • 4.3Turn-medial pain displays
    • 4.4Sequence-final pain displays
  • 5.Discussion
  • References
References (61)
References
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage (eds). 1984. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bateman, Amanda. 2020. “Young Children’s Affective Stance Through Embodied Displays of Emotion During Tellings.” Text & Talk, 40(5), 643–668. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bendelow, Gillian. 1993. “Pain Perceptions, Emotion and Gender.” Sociology of Health and Illness 15(3): 273–94. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bendelow, Gillian, and Simon Williams. 1995. “Pain and the Mind-Body Dualism: A Sociological Approach.” Body & Society 1 (2):83–103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bickley, Lynn S. 2007. Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking. 11 ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boddice, Rob, ed. 2014. Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Butler, David S., and G. Lorimer Moseley. 2013. Explain Pain. Adelaide, Australia: Noigroup Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. [1872]/1965. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Descartes, Rene. [1664]/2003. Treatise of Man. Translated by Thomas Steele Hall. New York, NY: Prometheus Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Edwards, Derek. 1997. Discourse and Cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. “Emotion Discourse.” Culture and Psychology 5 (3):271–291. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul, and Erika L. Rosenberg, eds. 2005. What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (Facs). 2nd edition ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Franks, D. D. and E. Doyle McCarthy (Eds.). 1989. The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1978. “Response Cries.” Language 54 (4):787–815. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie H., Asta Cekaite, and Charles Goodwin. 2012. “Emotion as Stance.” In Emotion in Interaction, ed. by Marja–Leena Sorjonen and Anssi Peräkylä, 16–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grahek, Nikola. 2007. Feeling Pain and Being in Pain. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1957. “Meaning.” The Philosophical Review 66 (3):377–388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Güzel, Hande. 2018. “Pain as Performance: Re-Virginisation in Turkey.” Journal of Medical Humanities 44:89–95. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heath, Christian. 1989. “Pain Talk: The Expression of Suffering in the Medical Consultation.” Social Psychology Quarterly 52 (2):113–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. “Demonstrative Suffering: The Gestural (Re) Embodiment of Symptoms.” Journal of Communication 52 (3):597–616. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hedström, Peter, and Petri Ylikoski. 2010. “Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 49–67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hepburn, Alexa, and Galina B. Bolden. 2017. Transcribing for Social Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 2010. “Questioning in Medicine.” In ‘Why Do You Ask?’: The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse, edited by Alice F. Freed and Susan Ehrlich, 42–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heritage, John, and Jeffrey D. Robinson. 2006. “Accounting for the Visit: Giving Reasons for Seeking Medical Care.” In Communication in Medical Care: Interaction between Primary Care Physicians and Patients, ed. by John Heritage and Douglas M. Maynard, 48–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3):551–575. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1983. The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holdcroft, Anita, and Sian Jaggar. 2005. Core Topics in Pain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jackson, Jean E. 2005. “Stigma, Liminality, and Chronic Pain: Mind-Body Borderlands.” American Ethnologist 32(3): 332–353. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 1979. “A Technique for Inviting Laughter and Its Subsequent Acceptance/ Declination.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, edited by George Psathas, 79–96. New York, NY: Irvington Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1984. “On the Organization of Laughter in Talk About Troubles.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 346–369. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail, Harvey Sacks, and Emmanuel A. Schegloff. 1987. “Notes on Laughter in the Pursuit of Intimacy.” In Talk and Social Organization, ed. by Graham Button and John R. E. Lee, 152–205. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, Laura. 2015. “Negotiating Pain: The Joint Construction of a Child’s Bodily Sensations.” Sociology of Health and Illness 37 (2):298–311. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, Laura, and Alexa Hepburn. 2015. “Children’s Sensations as Interactional Phenomena: A Conversation Analysis of Children’s Expressions of Pain and Discomfort.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 00:1–20. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kugelmann, Robert. 2017. Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological, and Critical Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
La, Jessica. 2018. “The Interactional Organization of Pain Displays in Medical Consultations.” Thesis for Master of Science in Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leder, Drew. 1984. “Toward a Phenomenology of Pain.” The Review of Existential Psychiatry 19:255–266.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “The Experiential Paradoxes of Pain.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41:444–460. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Linden, David J. 2015. Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McArthur, Amanda. 2018. “Getting Pain on the Table in Primary Care Physical Exams.” Social Science and Medicine 200:190–198. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. “Pain and the Collision of Expertise in Primary Care Physical Exams.” Discourse Studies 21 (5):522–539. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. forthcoming. “Diagnosis Resistance in US Primary Care.” Thesis for Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2014a. “Conventions for Multimodal Transcription.” [URL]
. 2014b. “The Local Constitution of Multimodal Resources for Social Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 65:137–156. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morris, David. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peräkylä, Anssi, and Marja–Leena Sorjonen (eds). 2012. Emotion in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle. 2012. “Greeting: Displaying Stance through Prosodic Recipient Design.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(4): 375–398. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven, Martin A. Nowak, and James J. Lee. 2008. “The Logic of Indirect Speech.” PNAS 105 (3):833–838. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Potter, Jonathan, and Derek Edwards. 2014. “Conversation Analysis and Psychology.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raymond, Chase Wesley, and Tanya Stivers. 2016. “The Omnirelevance of Accountability: Off-Record Account Solicitations.” In Accountability in Social Interaction, edited by Jeffrey D. Robinson, 321–353. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ruusuvuori, Johanna. 2014. “Emotion, Affect and Conversation.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, edited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 330–349. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A. 2000. “When ‘Others’ Initiate Repair.” Applied Linguistics 21 (2):205–243. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A., and Harvey Sacks. 1974. “Opening up Closings.” Semiotica 8 (2):165–187.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sullivan, Mark D. 1996. “Pain as Emotion.” Pain forum 5 (3):208–209. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trigg, Roger. 1970. Pain and Emotion. Gloucestershire, England: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, Bryan. 1992. Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weiste, Elina, and Anssi Peräkylä. 2014. “Prosody and Empathic Communication in Psychotherapy Interaction.” Psychotherapy Research 24 (6): 687–701. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Whalen, Jack, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1998. “Observations on the Display and Management of Emotion in Naturally Occurring Activities: The Case of ‘Hysteria’ in Calls to 911.” Social Psychology Quarterly 61:141–159. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilkinson, Sue, and Celia Kitzinger. 2006. “Surprise as an Interactional Achievement: Reaction Tokens in Conversation.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69 (2):150–182. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williams, Simon J. 2001. Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1967] 1981. Zettel. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Svensson, Hanna, Sofian A. Bouaouina & Guillaume Gauthier
2025. The social accountability of burn displays. Discourse Studies DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue