Discourse, Conversation And Argumentation Theoretical Perspectives And Innovative Empirical Studies - Volume I

Thinking about how we participate in an interaction through verbal and non-verbal exchanges is a way to focus on explicit and implicit norms, personal and collective preferences, subjective and interpersonal theories, and social processes of construction of meaning that characterize our everyday communicative interactions. Although discursive, conversational, and argumentative interactions play an essential role in our lives, there is no integrated area of psychological research on these types of communicative interactions. A wide variety of works is available concerning the focus on the different roles played by social actors within the interactions (symmetric-asymmetric, protagonist-antagonist, and teacher-learner), as well as the interest for the constitutive (emotional, motivational, and cognitive) aspects of the interactions or developmental factors (skills, competences, and knowledge). However, research on these topics is conducted in a number of separate research communities that are spread across disciplines and have only limited intertwinements. This Research Topic intends to offer a dialogical platform for sharing studies on discourse, conversation, and argumentation from a psychological perspective. Different strands were bridged together to reach two main goals: (1) to explore novel and promising theoretical perspectives to study discursive, conversational, and argumentative interactions from a psychological perspective; (2) and provide an extensive platform of the latest innovative research investigating interactions between individuals, groups, and institutions. The Research Topic provided an opportunity for researchers working in different international and psychological contexts to draw together their work within a common forum. Through their contributions, authors provided state-of-the-art of collective evidences in psychological research on discourse, conversation, and argumentation. They were able to place emphasis on opportunities for mutual awareness and integration by proposing a series of high-quality original research papers, reviews, and conceptual analyses on topics dealing with the above-mentioned issues. The contributions are focused on psychological perspectives on interactions and empirically supported approaches to analyze them. This panel of respectful researchers contributed to render the Research Topic particularly timely and open to colleagues who are continually exposed to nearly limitless sectorial approaches. In this vein, we hope that the contributions can be challenging for a large scientific audience to support integrated psychological research on discursive, conversational, and argumentative interactions. The paper of Koskinen et al. presents an original research offering a better understanding of the affective corollaries of social interactions during a psychophysiological experience of solving moral dilemmas. The authors compared participants with and without depression and showed their positions in expressing agreements and disagreement while solving moral dilemmas together. Heller proposes a study on embodied displays of “doing thinking” by analyzing the epistemic and interactive functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. From an interactional perspective, her paper investigates moments in which one participant in an interaction embodies displays of doing thinking as a recurring social practice serving interactive functions. The activities of joint decision-making are considered the functional argumentative setting to reach two interrelated aims: the first is to describe how multiple modalities (gaze and bodily postures) are temporally coordinated to create multimodal gestalts of doing thinking; the second one is to generate knowledge about the functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. Jiménez-Aleixandre and Brocos propose another original paper to highlight