Laughing alone and laughing together in panel meetings: laughter as an interactional accomplishment during negotiation talks
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Mehmet Ali Icbay
Mehmet Ali Icbay is currently working as an associate professor in the Department of Adult Education and Lifelong Learning at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey. He received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His research interests include the ethnomethological account of social organization in classroom settings. He is mainly interested in demonstrating how teaching and learning are accomplished by teachers and students together in the classrooms.
and
Timothy Koschmann
Timothy Koschmann is an emeritus professor of Medical Education at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He began his academic preparation in Philosophy (BA, University of Missouri- Kansas City), going on to complete advanced degrees in Experimental Psychology (MS, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Computer Science (PhD, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1987). In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Göteborg University (Faculty of Education). His research focuses upon the practical organizations of instruction and learning.
Abstract
This paper is about the interactional organization of shared laughter in a multi-party institutional setting. It explored how laughter was produced and shared in a series of panel meetings in a medical school. The audio data were taken from Competency Project, a NIHM-funded (National Institute of Mental Health) research designed to investigate how the judgments of professional competence in medical schools were constructed. In the panel meetings, a group of three panelists (physician-instructors) gathered together and came to an agreement for the medical students’ performances with the standard patients. While they negotiated their individual ratings, the panelists repeatedly laughed. Finding its interest in these repeated laughs, this study first displayed how laughter was produced and shared in a formal institutional setting. The second section in the paper gave a detailed account of the three cases where at least a panelist in the meetings did not join in the shared laughter sequences. The closer look at these cases suggested that when at least a panelist did not participate in the shared laughter, (1) the non-laughing panelists were mitigating the tension rooted in the disagreement on the negotiated rating, or (2) they were postponing their laugh to create a follow-up laughable, or (3) due to the conflict on the individual ratings, they were teased by the other panelists.
Funding source: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Division of Services and Intervention Research (DSIR)
Award Identifier / Grant number: 5R03MH74970-2
About the authors
Mehmet Ali Icbay is currently working as an associate professor in the Department of Adult Education and Lifelong Learning at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey. He received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His research interests include the ethnomethological account of social organization in classroom settings. He is mainly interested in demonstrating how teaching and learning are accomplished by teachers and students together in the classrooms.
Timothy Koschmann is an emeritus professor of Medical Education at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He began his academic preparation in Philosophy (BA, University of Missouri- Kansas City), going on to complete advanced degrees in Experimental Psychology (MS, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Computer Science (PhD, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1987). In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Göteborg University (Faculty of Education). His research focuses upon the practical organizations of instruction and learning.
Acknowledgments
The work described here was supported in part by a grant (Grant #: 5R03MH74970-2) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Division of Services and Intervention Research (DSIR).
Appendix: Transcription conventions
| £yes£ | smile voice |
| (h) | laugh sound |
| [ | point of overlap onset |
| ] | point of overlap offset |
| = | no break or gap |
| (0.4) | pause measured in tenths of seconds |
| (.) | micropause |
| . | low fall in intonation |
| ? | high rise in intonation |
| , | slight rise or slight fall |
| :: | lengthening of previous sound |
| >yes< | talk produced at a more rapid pace than previous surrounding talk |
| YES | increased volume |
| yes | emphasis |
| ye- | sound cut-off |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Full Length Articles
- Prosodic markers of satirical imitation
- The relationship between humor and women’s body image concerns and eating behaviors
- Humor and hierarchy: an experimental study of the effects of humor production on male dominance, prestige and attractiveness
- Comedy Bootcamp: stand-up comedy as humor training for military populations
- Laughing alone and laughing together in panel meetings: laughter as an interactional accomplishment during negotiation talks
- Organizational humor as making our work more meaningful: mediation by crafting job resources
- Humor and resilience: relationships with happiness in young adults
- Humor and fear of COVID-19 in Polish adults: the mediating role of generalized anxiety
- Book Reviews
- Danielle Fuentes Morgan: Laughing to keep from dying: African American satire in the twenty-first century
- Baumgartner, Jody C. and Amy B. Becker, eds: Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape: A New Generation of Research
