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Embodying Empathy in Everyday and Institutional Settings: On the Negotiation of Resources, Rights, and Responsibilities in Comforting Actions

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Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings

Abstract

This paper investigates the multimodal resources used by participants for doing being empathic. Extracts from three different settings are discussed: mother-child play, elementary school, and a public political debate . The sequences consist of a display of physical or emotional discomfort and a responsive comforting action . In terms of resources deployed, the bodily dimension is particularly stressed: In specific sequential positions, comforting is achieved by reducing physical distance, establishing close body positions, and bodily contact . Comforting is then ‘embodied’. Such sequences bring larger activities to a halt: When physical or emotional distress is brought up in interaction, the business of ‘treating the participant’s distress ’ seems to become ‘the main job’. Only when this job is jointly treated as accomplished can the overall social activity be pursued.

The data used in this paper are not available in publicly accessible corpora. Colleagues interested in the data are most welcome to contact me to get access (maxi.kupetz@germanistik.uni-halle.de).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These descriptions are written in double parentheses on a separate line and they are aligned with the verbal and vocal transcriptions through the symbol |.

  2. 2.

    In other episodes from this dyad , the canonical form AUa::; is used (with stress on the first syllable, falling intonation , eventually final lengthening, and breathy voice).

  3. 3.

    I would like to thank Vivien Heller, who is responsible for the corpus from which these classroom extracts are taken, for permission to work with the data. Furthermore, I am grateful to the members of the colloquium ‘Projects in Interactional Linguistics’ conducted by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten at the University of Potsdam, and to their guest Stefan Pfänder, for valuable comments on how to approach the data and the topic.

  4. 4.

    For a sketch of debates on touching in the classroom and on touching in upbringing, see Classen (2005: 40ff.). For detailed interactional analyses of ‘touch as social control’ in adult-child interaction, see Cekaite (2016).

  5. 5.

    At one point, when several students claim to need to go to the bathroom, the teacher even makes this explicit: das stEckt jetzt NICHT an; (this is not infectious) (05:29). Later, when one student walks up to the teacher claiming to have a sore tummy, the teacher points out: das sin Alles AUSreden; (these are all excuses) (13:35). In that respect cf. Parsons: “Illness may be treated […] as one way of evading social responsibilities” (1951: 431).

  6. 6.

    Stills are reproduced with kind permission of the Federal Press Office (www.bundesregierung.de).

  7. 7.

    This possibly prevents the chancellor from being publicly perceived as ‘heartless’. Indeed, the whole episode was an object of an intense public debate in the newspapers and in social media (see e.g. Spiegel Online (Politik, July 17th, 2015): http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/angela-merkel-und-ihr-troestversuch-das-sagen-die-medien-a-1023782.html#js-article-comments-box-pager, latest retrieval on February 19th, 2016).

  8. 8.

    For studies in developmental psychology on touching in parent-child interaction, see Stack and Jean (2011). Interestingly, the authors state: “how touching is integrated with the other communication channels that are available would benefit from continued investigation … While we have made progress in measuring types and more recently functions of touch, much remains to be done to demonstrate more fully the communicative nature and other roles that touch serves” (Ibid.: 290f.).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jörg Bergmann, Geoff Raymond, Margret Selting, Xiaoting Li, the members of the DFG Network ‘Multimodality and Embodied Interaction’, as well as two InLiSt editors for important comments on earlier versions of the paper. I am indebted to Gene Lerner for encouraging me to take a slightly different route. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

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  1. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

    Maxi Kupetz

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  1. Institute of New Philologies, Modern Languages, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Elisabeth Reber

  2. Department of English, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Cornelia Gerhardt

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Kupetz, M. (2019). Embodying Empathy in Everyday and Institutional Settings: On the Negotiation of Resources, Rights, and Responsibilities in Comforting Actions. In: Reber, E., Gerhardt, C. (eds) Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97325-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97325-8_10

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