The study of emotional processes in communication: I. Measuring emotionalization in everyday face-to-face communicative interaction

The drawbacks of traditional research into emotional processes have led us to develop a set of methodologies for investigating them in everyday face-t o-face communication. The conceptual basis of these procedures is a model o f the eliciting conditions of emotional processes as well as a conceptualiz ation of the emotional processes themselves. On the basis of the assumption of conversation as a rule-governed process, one can describe its default t emporal, formal, and functional features, for which we use the MAS EDIT and SEQ programs, and the minimal model of communicative exchange, respectivel y. Violations of these default rules can be identified as unexpected/tempor ally unpredictable events eliciting emotionalization. The nature of emotion alization is determined by the psychological principle of "standard and dev iation." Its investigation under natural conditions requires the following: A noninvasive method of data acquisition (including procedures for rejecti ng faulty or missing values), measurement (high-resolution recording of phy siological, psychomotor, and vocal variables), and the (nonstatistical) con struction of an inventory or "relevant effects" (contrastive and template a nalysis). Finally, we depict three routes of investigating time courses of activation changes as dependent and independent variables and as a target o f modification and reflection.