Emotion talk in psychotherapy for adolescents with depression in China: An observational study using conversation analysis.

This study examined how emotion talk was initiated in naturally occurring psychotherapeutic interaction for adolescents with depression in China. The data comprised 27 audio-recorded psychotherapy sessions and were analyzed using conversation analysis. The analysis identified two broad patterns of emotion-talk initiation: therapist-initiated and client-initiated talk. Therapists initiated emotion talk through open inquiries about emotional experience, inquiries about thoughts linked to emotion, and candidate formulations, with these practices varying in how explicitly they nominated emotion and in the response possibilities they made available. Clients initiated emotion talk following broader problem-presentation openings by directly labelling emotions, describing generalized emotional states, or narrating manifestations of emotional distress. This study further demonstrated that emotion-talk initiation was an interactional achievement through which emotional experience was progressively brought into interactional relevance. These findings extended conversation analytic research on emotion in psychotherapy by specifying the practices and sequential environments through which therapists and adolescent clients made emotion a relevant object of psychotherapeutic interaction.