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Part of
How Emotions Are Made in Talk
Edited by Jessica S. Robles and Ann Weatherall
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 321] 2021
► pp. 211–232

Chapter 3.2
Socializing the emotions of joy and surprise in parent-child interaction

ORCID logo | Columbia University

The importance of emotional competence and the pivotal role parents play in the development of such competence have been a topic of great interest for developmental psychologists and linguistic anthropologists alike. While existing research on emotional socialization primarily focuses on negative emotions using mostly experimental or ethnographic methods, positive emotions remain an under-explored territory, and conversation analysis an under-utilized micro-analytic tool. This chapter investigates how the socialization of joy and surprise is accomplished in a repeated series of playful gift giving and receiving during video-recorded mealtime parent-child interactions in a U.S. family with a three-year-old girl and her parents. Findings contribute to the broader literature on parent-child interaction with a specific focus on the socialization of emotions.

Keywords: emotion, joy, surprise, socialization, conversation analysis, play, parent-child interaction, gifting sequence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Socialization of emotion
    • 2.2Parent-child interaction
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Parental enactment of joy and surprise
    • 4.2Child re-enactment of joy and surprise
    • 4.3Socializing joy without surprise
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • References
Published online: 12 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.321.08war
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