Embodied Interaction in Mental Health Consultations: Some Observations on Grounding and Repair

Abstract

Shared physical space is an important resource for face-to-face interaction. People use the position and orientation of their bodies—relative to each other and relative to the physical environment—to determine who is part of a conversation, to manage conversational roles (e.g. speaker, addressee, side-participant) and to help co-ordinate turn-taking. These embodied uses of shared space also extend to more fine-grained aspects of interaction, such as gestures and body movements, to support topic management, orchestration of turns and grounding. This paper explores the role of embodied resources in (mis)communication in a corpus of mental health consultations. We illustrate some of the specific ways in which clinicians and patients can exploit embodiment and the position of objects in shared space to diagnose and manage moments of misunderstanding.

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