The plenary speaker is Professor Şükriye Ruhi (Middle East Technical University, Ankara).
A Place for Emotions in Conceptualizing Face and Relational Work
Şükriye Ruhi Middle East Technical University, Ankara
The intertwining of emotions with face and (im)politeness is recognized (Goffman 1967; Arndt and Janney 1985), but little research has specifically made it the object of research, and current theorizing on face and (im)politeness is inadequate in regard to the status and role of emotions in social interaction. Studies on face and (im)politeness, however, even if only in passing, attest to the significance of the (self-conscious) emotions and emotive discourse (Haidt 2003; Leary 2007) in conceptualizations of face and relational work (e.g., Ukosakul 2003; Ruhi, in press; Ting-Toomey, in press). This neglect is all the more striking given that emotion is linguistically entrenched in several languages in fairly formulaic expressions that convey emotions and emotive responses with the lexeme ‘face’. In English, for instance, one may show a ‘cold face’, put on a ‘hurt face’, one’s face may become ‘pink with embarrassment’, etc. Social psychology, emotion and self research and communication studies, on the other hand, abound in investigations of the role of emotion in interpersonal relations and perceptions of personality (e.g., Hess 2000; see, Leary (2007) for a review and Hareli and Hess (2009) for a recent investigation), and offer potentials for modeling the function of emotions and the bases of emotive responses in studies on face and (im)politeness.
Informed by the fields of emotion and self research, and impression management (Lazarus 2006; Leary 2007; Russell 2003; Barrett 2006; Schlenker and Pontari 2000; Tracy and Robins 2007), the paper extends proposals in Ruhi (2006, 2008, under review) and Ruhi and Işık (2007), and places the inter-relationships between values, intentionality, core affect (pleasure-displeasure and activation), and empathy as primary components in modeling the emotive dimension of face and relational work. The paper first briefly dwells on some major reasons for the neglect of emotions in theorizing on face and (im)politeness, and discusses epistemological and methodological challenges to situating emotions within the field of investigation. It then presents the findings of a diary study in Turkish, probing participants’ self-reports on ‘noticeable’ social interactions, and situates the experienced emotions (e.g., joy, hurt, anger and embarrassment) within the episodic structure of the narratives.
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