Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology

Abstract

Interactional adjustment refers to people’s tendency to adjust, or adapt, their communication behavior in social interactions. In recent years, three distinctive approaches to this topic that have featured prominently in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology are communication accommodation theory (CAT), language style matching (LSM), and discursive psychology using conversation analysis (DPCA). In this article, we provide a review of these three approaches, highlighting what defines and distinguishes them, as well as what insights into interactional adjustment each offers. We draw out the connections and points of tensions between these approaches; in so doing, we identify future directions for research on interactional adjustment as a fundamental aspect of human communication, and in the study of language and social psychology.

Natural Language Analysis and the Psychology of Verbal Behavior: The Past, Present, and Future States of the Field

“…After all, social interaction implies interpersonal attention, and the degree to which people are focused on each other is the foundation upon which social interactions are built. Nevertheless, the attentional processes captured by LSM (see Gasiorek et al, 2021) and LSS are but a small piece of a much, much larger puzzle. Attentional patterns are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain the myriad of underlying motivations and goals at play during social interactions (Berger, 2014; Horowitz et al, 2006).…”

The Patterns of Influence: LIWC Analysis of Leading News Portals' Impact and Communication Accommodation Theory on Twitter

“…2. Beyond just negative emotions (e.g., Fong et al 2021), other linguistic categories expressed in media tweets are reflected in tweets of their followers, as expected by the theory of emotional contagion (Hatfield et al 1993), which envisions the spread of negative emotions through social media and as expected by the communication accommodation theory (Gasiorek et al 2021), which envisions adju-stments in communication's linguistic styles depending on the parties taking part in the interaction. If increases in negative emotions among media followers are not found in relation to increases in negative emotions in media tweets, this would be enough to reject the hypothesis.…”

What Does “Resistance” Actually Look Like? The Respecification of Resistance as an Interactional Accomplishment

“…As researchers have documented, delays in producing responsive actions—and the practices for implementing such delays, including in breaths, lexical, and phrasal prefaces and their prosodic features, and so on—are overwhelmingly devoted to calibrating how a next action resists one or more elements of a first or prior action, and are oriented to as such by others (see Heritage, 1984). More generally, studies of the sequential organization of interaction reveal fundamental asymmetries between agreeing and disagreeing (Sacks, 1987), conforming to the relevancies set in motion by an initiating action and its alternatives (Raymond, 2003; see also Stivers & Hayashi, 2010), accepting the epistemic and deontic frameworks embodied in action and challenging their terms and assumptions (Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Raymond, 2018; Raymond & Heritage, 2006), selecting among alternative lexical choice in service of recipient design (Gasiorek, Weatherall et al, 2021; Holler & Stevens, 2007), and so on. A review of the occasions where parties use these intersecting methods to exert influence suggests that the next actions do not entail a simple binary choice between conformity and resistance (see also Llewellyn, 2015).…”