How Emotions Are Made in Talk

Hesitance among conversation analysts and other interaction scholars to explicitly link pain with emotion may stem from a conceptual dualism separating the body from the mind that has underpinned much work on emotion. Focusing on pain displays in primary care physical exams, I investigate the boundaries of this divide. I argue that pain displays allow speakers to accomplish actions ‘off-record’ that might otherwise be seen as socially or interactionally problematic. The social mechanism (i.e. th