Arriving: Expanding the Personal State Sequence

ABSTRACT

When arriving to a social encounter, how and when can a person show how s/he is doing/feeling? This article answers this question, examining personal state sequences in copresent openings of casual (residential) and institutional (parent-teacher) encounters. Describing a regular way participants constitute—and move to expand—these sequences, this research shows how arrivers display a nonneutral (e.g., negative, humorous, positive) personal state by both (1) deploying interactionally timed stance-marking embodiments that enact a nonneutral state, and (2) invoking a selected previous activity/experience positioned as precipitating that nonneutral state. Data demonstrate that arrivers time their nonneutral personal state displays calibrated to their understanding of their relationship with coparticipants. Analysis reveals that arrivers use this action to proffer a firsthand experience as a self-attentive first topic that works as a bid for empathy, inviting recipients to collaborate in expanding the personal state sequence and thereby cocreate an empathic moment. Data in American English.

Notes

¹ Impersonal institutional interactions are those in which participants orient to their respective categorical identities (e.g., “citizens” and “dispatchers” in calls for emergency assistance) rather than their individual or personal identities. While the openings of some impersonal institutional interactions, particularly on the telephone, may involve a reduction of opening phase practices—including the omission of the personal state sequence (Whalen & Zimmerman, 1987)—the openings of other more personal institutional interactions, particularly those conducted face-to-face (e.g., parent-teacher conferences), recurrently include the personal state sequence.

² Data in this article also use: “bold” to indicate personal state sequence actions, arrows “->” to point to nonneutral personal state displays, an exclamation point “!” following an abruptly punctuated sound, an asterisk “*” to indicate onset of visible conduct described inside double parentheses “((*))” and a plus “+” to denote the moment in the transcript that a video frame grab figure occurs (cf. Mondada, 2009).

³ This does not preclude the possibility that in some cases parties might instead prioritize the prepresent party’s state (e.g., when an arriving parent returns home and prioritizes how the prepresent parent is doing, orienting to shared contextual knowledge that the latter has been home caring for sick children).

⁴ I connect this phenomenon to Goffman’s (1978) “response cries” with the caveat that Goffman’s writing did not describe, anticipate, or account for this particular action of interactionally timing one’s production of a reactive particle (including most commonly in my data set audible out-breaths/sighs and imprecations/exclamations) such that it is dislocated (temporally and spatially) from the original triggering experience (cf. Goodwin, 1996); see Conclusions.

⁵ During nonneutral personal state sequences, participants may orient to a negativity bias (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001); this requires future investigation.

⁶ Future research is needed to investigate if this is related to how, in mobile phone openings, location information is often relevant to one or both of the parties’ current activities that may be oriented to as bearing on their personal states (Hutchby & Barnett, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful to the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for supporting my analysis of the parent-teacher conference data in this project.