In this talk I will discuss a research project investigating the management of affectivity during institutional telephone interactions.  General goals of the work are to identify caller displays of affectivity and to describe how they are responded to by conciliator call-takers.  A particular research question that has arisen from the work is how the management of affectivity becomes consequential for the trajectory of the call.  The data are around 20 hours of complaint calls to an independent dispute resolution service for complaints about electricity and gas.  A tentative finding is that a lack of correspondence between caller and conciliator emotional stances may stall progress through the series of activities that cohere into the course of action accomplishing the institutional business.

Ann Weatherall is a Reader in Social Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where she has worked since 1994.  Her current research and teaching areas are conversation analysis (CA), discursive psychology and feminist psychology.  At present her work is primarily with two datasets - the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WCSNZE) and a developing corpus of calls to dispute resolution services about utilities.