Alexa Hepburn
Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction
I have been interested in young people and children's rights for a long time, so have been particularly pleased to develop a research collaboration with the NSPCC (the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children) which is the UK's foremost children's charity. Their helpline now fields over half a million calls a year, often reporting serious abuse, and my analyses continue to focus on things that the helpline's child protection officers find difficult to deal with, such as calls from young people, and expressions of anger and distress. This latter focus chimes with my interest in a 'discursive psychological' approach which considers supposedly inner, personal, individualised 'thoughts' and 'feelings' in terms of broader social and interactional practices. I hope that this paper can provide a resource for other researchers who are interested in studying crying and similar extreme emotion.
Alexa Hepburn is Lecturer in Social Psychology at Loughborough University.
