Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts

The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. Our findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are little acknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US-dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.

Does Emotion Talk and Emotion Knowledge Effect Children's Recall of a Staged Event?

<p>The current study compared children's memory for information accompanied by emotional or non-emotional talk, and also investigated the utility of emotion knowledge in prediction of recall. Seventy-five children aged 5-6 years participated in a staged event that involved visiting separate stations containing connected, causal information of an emotional or non-emotional theme. Children were assessed with a memory interview one week later. Children reported significantly more correct information from stations with an emotional focus. Children's emotion knowledge did not predict recall, however. Results show children better recall emotion-related information even when causality and connectedness is controlled for. Implications of the finding are discussed.</p>

Does Emotion Talk and Emotion Knowledge Effect Children's Recall of a Staged Event?

<p>The current study compared children's memory for information accompanied by emotional or non-emotional talk, and also investigated the utility of emotion knowledge in prediction of recall. Seventy-five children aged 5-6 years participated in a staged event that involved visiting separate stations containing connected, causal information of an emotional or non-emotional theme. Children were assessed with a memory interview one week later. Children reported significantly more correct information from stations with an emotional focus. Children's emotion knowledge did not predict recall, however. Results show children better recall emotion-related information even when causality and connectedness is controlled for. Implications of the finding are discussed.</p>

Parent-Child Reminiscing: Relationships between Parent Elaborations, Emotion Talk and Memory Contributions of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

<p>How parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) engage their children in reminiscing about the past was investigated in a sample of 12 children with ASD and 12 matched typically developing children. Analysis of parent elaboration styles and emotion talk during reminiscing revealed no significant differences between parents of children with ASD and parents of typically developing children. The elaboration style and emotion talk of parents of children with ASD was associated with their children's memory contributions and emotion talk during conversations. The discussion addresses why the social and language difficulties, characteristic of ASD, may not have impacted on parent-child reminiscing. It considers this specifically in relation to the role that parents of children with ASD play in 'scaffolding' their children through the critical developmental process of parent-child reminiscing.</p>

Parent-Child Reminiscing: Relationships between Parent Elaborations, Emotion Talk and Memory Contributions of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

<p>How parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) engage their children in reminiscing about the past was investigated in a sample of 12 children with ASD and 12 matched typically developing children. Analysis of parent elaboration styles and emotion talk during reminiscing revealed no significant differences between parents of children with ASD and parents of typically developing children. The elaboration style and emotion talk of parents of children with ASD was associated with their children's memory contributions and emotion talk during conversations. The discussion addresses why the social and language difficulties, characteristic of ASD, may not have impacted on parent-child reminiscing. It considers this specifically in relation to the role that parents of children with ASD play in 'scaffolding' their children through the critical developmental process of parent-child reminiscing.</p>

Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare

Everyday discursive practices comprising “emotion talk” constitute a site where morality is socialized. Yet few studies have examined how emotional expressions are assembled and serve as integral parts of the unfolding action in multi-party, remedial interchanges involving caregivers and children in early care settings. This paper examines a particular type of emotion talk, complement constructions with verbs of feeling (“want”) and saying (e.g., “Are you saying ‘no don’t stand on me’?) primed by caregivers as part of a curriculum encouraging children to use their words to express their feelings so children become sensitized to one another’s hurt feeling during peer disputes. The data were drawn from a larger corpus of video recordings of children’s naturalistic interaction collected over two years in two toddler-infant daycare centers with children aged 12–30 months. A talk-in-interaction approach was adopted. The syntactic formats provided to children by caregivers, and how children and caregivers recycled and laminated utterances with different kinds of modalities over turns, uncovered usually unarticulated normative socio-cultural assumptions regarding the shaping of affect at the daycare. The results illustrate how affective work in remedial interchanges provides a resource for participants to articulate moral values and underscore children’s agency.

Toward Integrating Research on Parent-Child Emotion Talk and Linguistic Theory: A Spotlight on Parents’ (In)direct Communication

Parent-child discussions about emotion are a key socialization influence on children’s socio-emotional development. Extant research on parent-child discussions about emotion largely focuses on three main types of discourse content: parental elaboration, parental use of emotion labels and explanations, and parental emotion coaching. A new direction involves distinguishing between parents’ direct and indirect communication of discourse content. This distinction may be vital when considering the role of children’s communicative competence in their developing socio-emotional competence. We integrate literature on (in)direct communication, a concept prominent in linguistics, and emotion socialization. We argue that parental indirect communication can teach children communicative competence in the context of emotion talk. We discuss literature from the developmental and linguistic fields on parents’ teaching of communicative skills, as well as potential cognitive, relational, and emotional functions of indirectness, with communication and its socialization embedded within cultural context. Finally, we suggest new research directions examining the role of parental indirect communication in children’s socio-emotional development. By integrating developmental and linguistic literatures, we provide a novel approach to the study of parental emotion socialization through parent-child discourse.