Facial Expression and Interactional Regulation of Emotion

The chapter shows how facial expressions are used in pursuing emotional responses to tellings. The data come from five dyadic conversations over lunch, recorded by three cameras. Sometimes a story, an announcement, or other telling, that is designed to convey the speaker’s emotional stance towards what is told, is not met by the recipient’s immediate emotional response. In such cases, the speaker may pursue response verbally. However, the chapter shows that a response can also be pursued by the speaker producing a facial expression at the closure of the telling. Such facial expressions can reinforce the stance of the telling, they can explicate a stance that in the (verbal) telling left implicit, or they can modify the stance. The chapter discusses these findings in the context of recent psychological theories on regulation of emotion.