Crying Receipts: Time, Empathy, and Institutional Practice

By A. Hepburn, Jonathan Potter. 2007

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72a1caca7c08d9d5e2e10f0f8d58e9400433aa90

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Citations in the corpus

Problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm (2011, background): “However, posters did appear to respond to requests to elaborate, and to statements of ‘being here’, which Hepburn and Potter termed ‘take your times’ (Hepburn and Potter, 2007), better than they did to offers of advice, which they often rejected or ignored.”
Designing the Recipient (2011, background): “A series of previous studies has documented a range of different features of this helpline (Hepburn 2005, 2006; Hepburn and Potter 2007; Hepburn and Wiggins 2005; Potter and Hepburn 2003, forthcoming).”
Accomplishing “rapport” in qualitative research interviews: Empathic moments in interaction (2018, background): “Empathy “involves sharing the perceived emotion of another – ‘feeling with’ another” (Eisenberg and Strayer 1990: 5) and is “the imaginative sharing of someone else’s experience” (Hepburn and Potter 2007: 99).”