How is emotional resonance achieved in storytellings of sadness/distress?

Storytelling pivots around stance seen as a window unto emotion: storytellers project a stance expressing their emotion toward the events and recipients preferably mirror that stance by affiliating with the storyteller’s stance. Whether the recipient’s affiliative stance is at the same time expressive of his/her emotional resonance with the storyteller and of emotional contagion is a question that has recently attracted intriguing research in Physiological Interaction Research. Connecting to this line of inquiry, this paper concerns itself with storytellings of sadness/distress. Its aim is to identify factors that facilitate emotion contagion in storytellings of sadness/distress and factors that impede it. Given the complexity and novelty of this question, this study is designed as a pilot study to scour the terrain and sketch out an interim roadmap before a larger study is undertaken. The data base is small, comprising two storytellings of sadness/distress. The methodology used to address the above research question is expansive: it includes CA methods to transcribe and analyze interactionally relevant aspects of the storytelling interaction; it draws on psychophysiological measures to establish whether and to what degree emotional resonance between co-participants is achieved. In discussing possible reasons why resonance is (not or not fully) achieved, the paper embarks on an extended analysis of the storytellers’ multimodal storytelling performance (reenactments, prosody, gaze, gesture) and considers factors lying beyond the storyteller’s control, including relevance, participation framework, personality, and susceptibility to emotion contagion.