Cover not available
Part of
How Emotions Are Made in Talk
Edited by Jessica S. Robles and Ann Weatherall
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 321] 2021
► pp. 263–286

Chapter 3.4
Affect and accountability

Pain displays as a resource for action

ORCID logo | University of California Los Angeles

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.

Keywords: pain, emotion, affect, accountability, social mechanism, interactional affordance, Cartesian dualism, physical examination, doctor-patient communication, primary care, sociology of pain, sociology of emotion
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
Published online: 12 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.321.10mca
References
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage
(eds) 1984 Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bateman, Amanda
2020 “Young Children’s Affective Stance Through Embodied Displays of Emotion During Tellings.” Text & Talk, 40(5), 643–668. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bendelow, Gillian
1993 “Pain Perceptions, Emotion and Gender.” Sociology of Health and Illness 15(3): 273–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bendelow, Gillian, and Simon Williams
1995 “Pain and the Mind-Body Dualism: A Sociological Approach.” Body & Society 1 (2):83–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bickley, Lynn S.
2007 Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking. 11 ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.Google Scholar
Boddice, Rob
ed. 2014 Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, David S., and G. Lorimer Moseley
2013 Explain Pain. Adelaide, Australia: Noigroup Publications.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles
[1872]/1965 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Descartes, Rene
[1664]/2003 Treatise of Man. Translated by Thomas Steele Hall. New York, NY: Prometheus Books.Google Scholar
Edwards, Derek
1997 Discourse and Cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
1999 “Emotion Discourse.” Culture and Psychology 5 (3):271–291. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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
Goffman, Erving
1978 “Response Cries.” Language 54 (4):787–815. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grahek, Nikola
2007 Feeling Pain and Being in Pain. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. Paul
1957 “Meaning.” The Philosophical Review 66 (3):377–388. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Güzel, Hande
2018 “Pain as Performance: Re-Virginisation in Turkey.” Journal of Medical Humanities 44:89–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heath, Christian
1989 “Pain Talk: The Expression of Suffering in the Medical Consultation.” Social Psychology Quarterly 52 (2):113–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 “Demonstrative Suffering: The Gestural (Re) Embodiment of Symptoms.” Journal of Communication 52 (3):597–616. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hedström, Peter, and Petri Ylikoski
2010 “Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 49–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hepburn, Alexa, and Galina B. Bolden
2017 Transcribing for Social Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle 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
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell
1979 “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3):551–575. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1983 The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Holdcroft, Anita, and Sian Jaggar
2005 Core Topics in Pain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Jean E.
2005 “Stigma, Liminality, and Chronic Pain: Mind-Body Borderlands.” American Ethnologist 32(3): 332–353. DOI logoGoogle 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
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
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
Jenkins, Laura
2015 “Negotiating Pain: The Joint Construction of a Child’s Bodily Sensations.” Sociology of Health and Illness 37 (2):298–311. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kugelmann, Robert
2017 Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological, and Critical Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.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
Leder, Drew
1984 “Toward a Phenomenology of Pain.” The Review of Existential Psychiatry 19:255–266.Google Scholar
2016 “The Experiential Paradoxes of Pain.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41:444–460. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Linden, David J.
2015 Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.Google Scholar
McArthur, Amanda
2018 “Getting Pain on the Table in Primary Care Physical Exams.” Social Science and Medicine 200:190–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Pain and the Collision of Expertise in Primary Care Physical Exams.” Discourse Studies 21 (5):522–539. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morris, David
1991 The Culture of Pain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Peräkylä, Anssi, and Marja–Leena Sorjonen
(eds) 2012 Emotion in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle
2012 “Greeting: Displaying Stance through Prosodic Recipient Design.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(4): 375–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pinker, Steven, Martin A. Nowak, and James J. Lee
2008 “The Logic of Indirect Speech.” PNAS 105 (3):833–838. DOI logoGoogle 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
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. DOI logoGoogle 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
Schegloff, Emmanuel A.
2000 “When ‘Others’ Initiate Repair.” Applied Linguistics 21 (2):205–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A., and Harvey Sacks
1974 “Opening up Closings.” Semiotica 8 (2):165–187.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Mark D.
1996 “Pain as Emotion.” Pain forum 5 (3):208–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trigg, Roger
1970 Pain and Emotion. Gloucestershire, England: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Bryan
1992 Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Weiste, Elina, and Anssi Peräkylä
2014 “Prosody and Empathic Communication in Psychotherapy Interaction.” Psychotherapy Research 24 (6): 687–701. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, Sue, and Celia Kitzinger
2006 “Surprise as an Interactional Achievement: Reaction Tokens in Conversation.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69 (2):150–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Simon J.
2001 Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
[1967] 1981 Zettel. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar