They're here!
Emotionography: Theory, Research and Practice is published today. A book Alexa Hepburn and I have been building toward for thirty years. Here's why we think it matters. 🧵
Available now from APA with links to Kindle and Vital Source - www.apa.org/pubs/books/e...
Emotionography works with video and audio recordings of real interaction: child protection helplines, family mealtimes, therapy sessions, political interviews.
Transcribed in enough detail to catch what participants themselves attend to.
This is emotion in the wild, not the lab.
Hansun Zhang Waring wrote:
Potter and Hepburn had me at Chapter 1—with quotable
gems that kept me smiling and my highlighter running. You will never experience, study, and conceptualize emotions the same way again.
😊
David Silverman said:
70 years ago, C. Wright Mills showed that the ascription of motives was an interactional process. Now Potter and Hepburn have done the same for emotions.
😊
Rigorous, empirical, and grounded in fifty years of cumulative work in conversation analysis and discursive psychology.
What you won't find: emotion as it actually unfolds, in real conversation, in real settings. That gap is what this book fills. We feel that no course on emotion will be complete without it.
The book covers crying and upset, laughter, and anger, using intensive analysis of real cases. There's a full methods chapter for researchers interested to do this kind of work themselves, and a theoretical chapter mapping the relationship to existing frameworks.
Kenneth Gergen calls it
"an entirely new landscape of understanding and inquiry into the emotions"
Moving emotional study out of the laboratory and into real-life settings where emotion's interdependent functioning in ongoing relationships can finally be examined.