Emotionography

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 clinical study of emotion. Emotionography explores emotion as it happens in natural interactions, rather than through scales, experiments, or interviews. Emotion is live, consequential, and interactional, and it can be studied in a way that enables accuracy and offers improvements to clinical practice. The authors' detailed notation system, built on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, accurately captures every emotional nuance of an interaction. Step-by-step case examples show how crying and upset, laughter, and anger can be studied from an emotionographic perspective, as the authors elucidate the process of doing emotionographic research. This distinctive and dynamic approach demonstrates that the way we communicate our emotions to others impacts both how they respond emotionally to us and their subsequent actions. Through emotionography, psychologists and practitioners can improve their interactions with research subjects and clients and researchers can bring new analytic rigor to their work. The authors bring the study of emotion to life and offer new theoretical insights and new ways of recognizing emotion's impact in real-world settings.