Crying Receipts: Time, Empathy, and Institutional Practice

Abstract

In this article, we focus on the activities done by the recipients of crying. In the analysis, we work with a corpus of calls from a child protection helpline in which the caller shows features of crying (14 calls, or about 10% of the total). Our focus is on two kinds of crying receipts made by child protection officers (CPOs) that are rare in noncrying calls but recurrent in crying calls: take-your-times (TYTs) and empathic receipts (ERs). TYTs are used in environments in which the caller displays an attempt to but failure to articulate talk. This can be shown by inappropriate silence, wet sniffs, sobs, and turn constructional units that are either incomplete or disrupted by sobs, sniffs, or whispering. TYTs offer a license for the late delivery of talk and are affiliative. ERs can replace TYTs but are more common in environments in which callers are unresponsive to CPO actions such as advice giving. ERs have two elements—a formulation of the crying party's mental state and some sort of marker of the contingency of the mental state formulations. The mental state element is built from local features of the caller's talk (displays and metaformulations of upset), and issues of accuracy are managed through the epistemic contingency maker (most of ten treating the formulation as based on hearing). We discuss broader implications of this work for conceptions of empathy.

This research was supported by a fellowship from the UK Leverhulme Trust granted to Alexa Hepburn. We thank audience members for helpful feedback at seminars in the University of Surrey, March 2004; Lund University, June 2004; University of Rome, La Sapienza, July 2004; University of York, November 2004; University of Bath, March 2005; Jyvaskyla Yliopisto, March 2005; and the University of Northampton, October 2005. We are particularly grateful to the callers and child protection officers at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for allowing us access to their calls. We have benefitted immensely from a series of discussions with Jess Harris about her research on crying in medical settings and from comments on an earlier draft by Derek Edwards.

Notes

This research was supported by a fellowship from the UK Leverhulme Trust granted to Alexa Hepburn. We thank audience members for helpful feedback at seminars in the University of Surrey, March 2004; Lund University, June 2004; University of Rome, La Sapienza, July 2004; University of York, November 2004; University of Bath, March 2005; Jyvaskyla Yliopisto, March 2005; and the University of Northampton, October 2005. We are particularly grateful to the callers and child protection officers at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for allowing us access to their calls. We have benefitted immensely from a series of discussions with Jess Harris about her research on crying in medical settings and from comments on an earlier draft by Derek Edwards.

The NSPCC is Britain's foremost child protection charity and is unique in possessing statutory powers to safeguard children. Much of their direct contact is through a 24-hr National Child Protection Helpline that receives more than 250,000 calls per year. The NSPCC is legally mandated to pass on reports of abuse to social services and/or police when the information is sufficient and merits action whether the caller wishes this or not. The helpline also provides free counseling, information, and advice to anyone concerned about a child at risk of ill treatment or abuse or to children themselves who may be at risk. It is staffed by trained social workers with at least 3 years field experience of working in child protection. Our research is based mainly at the NSPCC's London call center where up to 18 call takers may be on duty at any one time in shifts of between 6 and 10 hr. They make notes on information given during calls. Calls are highly varied. They come from adults, young people, grandparents, parents, and neighbors and from people of different social class and ethnic backgrounds from all over Britain. They can be asking for advice, reporting abuse, or requiring counseling. Some issues may be relatively trivial; some may be literally life or death. They can last for a few minutes or stretch to over an hour (the average is something over 15 min). Some callers will call back for further advice or to report further information. When serious abuse is suspected, the call taker will follow the call directly with a call to the relevant police force or, more often, the local Social Services. Calls were recorded on mini disk and then digitized for transcription and analysis. All participants to the study consented to their calls being recorded for research and training purposes. CPOs only recorded the call if they were satisfied that informed consent had been given.

Of these 14 calls, 10 include crying sequences receipted using some combination of the phenomena we discuss in this article. In 2 of the calls that are not receipted in this way, the phone is put down by the caller. In 2 further calls, the features of crying are limited (neither involve full-scale sobbing), and both callers are able to continue through the crying to provide full abuse reports.

An extended audio and transcript of this extract is available at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ departments/ss/centres/darg/Hepburn_1.htm

The visual record illustrates that what may often be hearable as silence, inaudible talk, or a whisper on the telephone line that could be mouthing—attempting to speak, moving the mouth but with very little sound coming out. Note of course that this does not rule out the possibility that the contestant is doing trying to speak to get the receipt that he got—conversational phenomena of this kind are always open to subversion.

Although TYT is by far the commonest construction in these materials, there are alternatives such as just take a minute, and the TYT can be preceded by okay or don't worry.

“_Are you_” is a suggestion for transcribing an utterance said with uniform intonation throughout.

What seems to make this hearably sympathetic is its mirroring of the auditory feature of the prior turn, that is, elevated intonation and delay (coming after a 0.4-sec gap), and later on some quieter talk. This type of observation awaits more systematic exploration.

The sequential placement of sniffs is an interesting topic awaiting further study.

Indeed, one way of understanding the display of upset here would be that it is a way for the speaker to warrant the severity of the abuse despite not having the type of evidence (hearing what was said) requested by the CPO. Hence, crying may be epistemically relevant in conveying the seriousness of the caller's story. As Edwards (1997) noted, emotions can have a common sense status as somehow more direct and genuine than thoughts or versions of events. Edwards and Potter (2005) showed mental state descriptions/displays and states of affairs in the world are mutually implicative.

There may be a sequential link between the minimal crying and minimal uptake; this would require further study.

This is further discussed in Hepburn (2004, pp. 285–286) as is the turn on line 5, which ponders the coherence of the caller's report.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as “the power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” Sympathy is defined as “conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other.”

When we use the term mental state, we do not propose that such things are inner psychological objects. We treat mental states as interactional objects that participants are formulating or orienting to (see Edwards, 1997; Potter, 1998). The status of such things as inner is our business only insofar is it is treated as an issue by participants.

We are grateful to Derek Edwards for this latter observation.

There is a way of thinking of these receipts as empathic. As oh my gosh marks both news and surprise at something untoward and intonationally inflects this marking with sympathy, it could be argued that they are moves that display the CPO as reacting in something of the manner of the caller. In this sense, the turn could be empathic. This speculation would need further work to establish more clearly.

Many young callers have trouble with the standard advice to tell a responsible adult, perhaps because they figure that's what they are already doing.

The CPO's assessment plus tag also has features of an ER in that it assesses the source of the caller's upset—the “difficult time” that her friend is having and includes epistemic markers—“obviously” and the tag itself.

Hepburn (2004) suggested that apologies are often attending to incomplete adjacency pairs rather than offering global apologies for emotional displays. Note that here the sorry follows the failure of the caller to respond to the first possibly complete element of the advice as well as the overlapping sobbing. As is standard, the CPO accepts the apology.

See, for example, line 5 in Extract 8 for a more clear cut example of a tag question in first position.