Children's Sensations as Interactional Phenomena: A Conversation Analysis of Children's Expressions of Pain and Discomfort

Psychological research has typically studied pain by using participant indirect reports. The current study starts to build an alternative and complementary approach by directly studying pain expressions and displays, and the way they operate in interaction. It will focus on children's pain expressions in a corpus of 71 video recordings of British English speaking family mealtimes. We distinguish four relevant components of pain expressions: (a) lexical formulations, (b) prosodic features of crying and upset, (c) pain cries, and (d) embodied actions. Analysis shows how pain expressions are built as if they represent an internal private state and yet are treated as having an interactional function in the management of getting children to eat. We will conclude by sketching some directions for an interactional study of pain.