This paper debates the actual state of research on the appliance of negative mental verb constructions in social interaction. From a cross-linguistic view, it inspects the grammatical and interactional attributes that appear from extant research in the field. It debates how the increasing evidence offered by novel studies over a series of distinct languages, adds to inquiry on talk-in-interaction and to the lately appearing field of Pragmatic Typology. Results seem to indicate universal interactional motives for the grammatical features and the grammaticization of the explored constructions, and proposes that these motives derive from the primary demands for intersubjectivity in social interaction.