The emotions team investigates the ways in which expressions of emotion are coordinated with the structure and the process of social interaction. While most academic research on emotions focuses on psychological or physiological processes residing in individuals, we see emotions as thoroughly social. The intertwinement of the social, psychological and physiological aspects of emotion is of primary interest for us.

The team has five major research objectives:

By combining CA and up to date measuring techniques on biological responses controlled by the autonomous nervous system, we explore the ways in which interactional expressions of emotion are coordinated with physiological signs of emotional arousal and valence in the interacting individuals. Our data come from informal discussions between ‘neuro-typical’ individuals, from discussions where one participant has Asperger’s syndrome, and from psychotherapy sessions.

Researchers: Pentti Henttonen, Mikko Kahri, Anssi Peräkylä, Melisa Stevanovic, Liisa Voutilainen
Collaborators: Niklas Ravaja (Aalto University), Mikko Sams (University of Helsinki)

Using video- and audio recorded data that come from cognitive and psychodynamic therapies, we investigate how the “talking cure” is realized through practices of social interaction. We describe the ways in which therapists empathise with the patients and sometimes challenge the patients’ views or experiences. We also seek to describe the organisation of knowledge in psychotherapy: the social conditions of the therapist knowing about the patient’s mind, sometimes even better what the patient herself knows. Recently, we have started to compare interaction in psychotherapy with psychiatric outpatient consultations, and to investigate the ways in which dreams are discussed in classical psychoanalysis.

Researchers: Liisa Voutilainen, Elina Weiste, Anssi Peräkylä.
Collaborator: Jörg Bergmann (University of Bielefeld).

Using experimental methods, we compare capacity for empathy in human infants and in marmosets — primates whose social organisation resembles that of humans. In this project, we bring together conversation analytical understandings of emotion, and the theories and methods of primatology, evolutionary anthropology and developmental psychology. We also investigate interactions where the social and emotional bonds between domestic dogs and their owners are enacted.

Researchers: Sonja Koski, Mika Simonen