Laughing with and at Patients : The Roles of Laughter in Confrontations in Addiction Group Therapy

In Minnesota treatment, the therapists aim at breaking clients\u27 denial to encourage them to accept their addiction. However, the confrontation is risky since, instead of making the patient ready for a change, it may strengthen resistance against the diagnosis of addiction and the treatment recommendations. We will explore the role of laughter in confrontational practices. The study is based on conversation analysis of group therapy sessions in an inpatient addiction treatment clinic in Finland (7.5 hours of data altogether). The laughter prevails in three different kinds of practice: laughing off the troubles, strengthening the confrontation by laughing at the patient, and ameliorating the confrontation. Laughter is a flexible device for preventing or resolving the possible risks of confrontation

Befriending through online gaming

Peer reviewe

Kuinka Turmiolan Tommia olisi luettava?

English summary: How to read Turmiolan Tommi?

AA-retoriikan kuvat

Summary: Idioms and metaphors in AA rhetorics

Onko Helsingin yliopisto maailmanluokan yliopisto?

Käsite maailmanluokan yliopisto on paradoksi. Philip Altbach (2004) on kiteyttänyt sen muotoon: ”Kaikki haluavat sen, kukaan ei tiedä mikä se on, eikä kukaan tiedä kuinka sellaisen saisi.” Muitakin käsityksiä asiasta on. J. D. Rockefeller ja Harwardin silloinen rehtori Charles Eliot keskustelivat. J. D. kysyi, mitä mahtaisi maksaa maailmanluokan yliopiston perustaminen. Rehtori vastasi: ”Viisikymmentä miljoonaa dollaria ja kaksisataa vuotta” (Altbach 2004)

Knowing how to present yourself by knowing how to recognize false true facts

The presentation of self is a specific kind of knowledge of how to appear and speak publicly in the face of inferences of what can be drawn about how you have appeared and what you have said. As a specific case of the latter, there are things you cannot say publicly even if-or, in particular, when-they are true. This can be called recognition of false true facts. Of course, it could be claimed that knowing false true facts is just knowledge of a type of fact which does not require know-how but plain knowledge. In this article, we try to show that knowing false true facts is part of the presentation of self, which is based on know-how of telling false true facts from other facts (i.e., what you should never say publicly, however true it might be). Regarding our data, we analyze a videotaped interaction among a group of young females discussing what would be different in life if they were men. In their group discussion, they make a distinction regarding how a woman could answer that question and what could not be answered. Through defining what women could publicly say, the group performatively defines how women can present themselves. In that way, the presentation of self is based on know-how of the distinction between false true facts and other facts. At least on occasion, there does exist gender-specific expertise that delimits public performance of gender.Peer reviewe

Active and latent social groups and their interactional expertise

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.Peer reviewe