Linguistic and embodied displays of emotions and affects during car-rides

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Arnulf Deppermann
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557053375

The proposed research project seeks to study the display of emotions in naturally occurring social interaction, namely, in car-drives, by drivers and passengers. It will zoom in into the vocal, verbal, facial and gestural resources used for expressing emotions that arise in the context of driving experiences, with a particular focus on fear, anger, fright and surprise. However, attention will also be given to emotional displays that do not correspond to prototypical primary emotions as have been identified in psychology. With respect to the vocal and verbal modes of expression, particular emphasis will be put on the identification and analysis of vocalization patterns and interjections that are specific for certain emotions. Since comparable events that cause emotions are highly frequent und since driving allows for making high-quality video-recordings that lend themselves to the instrumental and qualitative analysis of facial expressions, car-drives are particularly apt for studying emotion in a naturalistic setting, while at the same time allowing for generalizable findings. This opens up the possibility to identify both conditions that cause emotions, socio-normative rules and ways of the interactional treatment of emotions displays, which cannot be studied in experimental settings in an ecologically valid way, while still gathering a sufficient number of occurrences that allow for a quantitative study of causing conditions and routine patterns of emotion display and treatment in social interaction. The project is particularly interested in how emotions develop by virtue of the relationship between drivers’ plans and intentions and traffic events on the hand, and in the normative dimensions of the display and negotiation of emotion displays, e.g., concerning the appropriateness of an emotion and the ways in which it is displayed, issues of moral attribution, etc. The project compares emotional displays in private and institutional settings (driving lessons) and between experienced and unexperienced drivers. The comparison aims at finding out in how far the presence of others affects the socio-normative regulation of emotions displays. The project will use existing data form the corpus FOLK and amend them by new data (100 hrs. in total). The study will use interactional linguistics, conversation analysis and multimodal analysis as methodological framework, supported by automatic detection of facial expression and corpus-linguistic procedures.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants