Publications

Publication details [#55780]

Muntigl, Peter, Naomi Knight and Ashley Watkins. 2012. Working to keep aligned in psychotherapy: Using nods as a dialogic resource to display affiliation. Language and Dialogue 2 (1) : 9–27.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ld

Annotation

This paper examines therapist nods in terms of how they display and maintain affiliation with clients in contexts in which therapists reformulate clients' prior talk. It is found that therapist nods functioned to maintain affiliation with clients irrespective of whether clients aligned (e.g., confirmed) or disaligned (e.g., disconfirmed) with the therapist's prior reformulation. Further, it was found that the sequential placement of a therapist's nod was influenced by the quality of alignment; that is, in aligning contexts, nods were found to be contiguous to the client's confirmation. In disaligning contexts, by contrast, therapists delayed the production of nods to a point at which the client either 'fully' disconfirmed or displayed an affectual stance regarding a personal event. It is argued that these forms of delay index a practice in which therapists may successfully secure realignment with clients.