UC San Diego

It is often assumed within the fields of psychology and psychiatry that emotions are internal, individual, and biological experiences. While there are aspects of emotion that are 'personal' (i.e. subjectively experienced, individual, and biological), following theoretical and methodological strands from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis I will examine how they are also co-produced, co-understood, and thus coauthored in interaction with others. In my analysis of transcripts from emotional health educational support sessions I attended with Mexican migrant women living near the Mexico-US border in San Diego, I show how the women collaboratively produce and jointly interpret emotional experience, particularly through the display of empathy. I argue that empathic interactions take place within extended assessment activities that illustrate particular learned reasoning strategies we use to attribute subjective (often metaphorically called 'inner' or 'internal') states to ourselves and others. These attributions, which I argue are visible in moment-to- moment microanalyses of interaction, are ubiquitous in social life and fundamental to its coordination. In this instance, I show how participants creatively maintain intersubjectivity and a therapeutic space in which to navigate their own self-understanding, stances, and identities