On Displaying Empathy: Dilemma, Category, and Experience

ABSTRACT

This article examines several conversational practices by which people show empathy with others’ experiences of extremely distressing, life-changing events. We recorded and analyzed volunteers’ handling of evacuees’ experiences of the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami and the related Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. The article demonstrates three different practices in how the volunteers reacted: formulating the troubles-teller’s experience as uniquely owned, differentiating the troubles-teller’s experiences from others’, and invoking the volunteer’s similar experiences as a basis for empathy. By orienting themselves toward the issue of who owns an experience, and which categories they can identify with, recipients do more than simply agree—they also affiliate with the speaker’s stance and show their understanding of the nature of the speaker’s experiences. Data are in Japanese with English translation.

Notes

¹ There is a particular aim for this activity, which is to relieve the evacuee’s stress through talking and, in addition, to identify their needs and concerns. The volunteers are, however, specifically instructed not to ask questions about the evacuee’s experience of the tsunami or the evacuation merely as a matter of curiosity.

² The authors participated as footbath volunteers, through which they obtained members’ knowledge of how to conduct the volunteering activity. This was incorporated into the analysis.

³ We use this term by relying on the same sense as Heritage and Watson (1979): The recipient’s practice of deleting, selecting, and transforming that which the previous speaker has just said as a summary or implication (for a more detailed review, see Antaki, 2009; Beach & Dixson, 2001). As several researchers have pointed out, Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) were the first to introduce the concept of formulations as a means to display intersubjectivity by commenting on what is going on in the talk (i.e., “a meta-pragmatic observation” [Antaki, 2009]), and, over time, it has been adopted to other kinds of practices, especially in psychotherapeutic sessions.