What function does self-disclosing conversation play in the conversations of young children? Two studies were conducted to investigate how 5 14 year old children self-disclose in their everyday conversations. Both studies video-recorded children’s self-disclosing conversations while they participated in an art activity. Study 1 investigated the effect of two conversational partner characteristics (age of partner and partner familiarity), and of the conversational context on children’s self-disclosing behavior. Children were paired with an unfamiliar adult, an unfamiliar peer, or a familiar peer play partner, and conversations were recorded in three interaction contexts. Self-disclosure was found to be a more frequent topic of conversation in a fairly barren conversational environment than during an art activity. In each context, however, children self-disclosed at least twice as often with an unfamiliar as with a familiar play partner. There was no difference in self-disclosing behavior for children paired with an unfamiliar adult or an unfamiliar peer. Study 2 was designed to investigate a possible function for increased self-disclosing with an unfamiliar partner: that children use self-disclosure in early conversations with unfamiliar partners to gauge the desirability of future interaction. It was hypothesized that children would evaluate unfamiliar partners who did not participate in self-disclosure less favorably than children paired with a self-disclosing partner. A methodology was designed to allow children to think they were talking to another child when they were actually speaking with a researcher trained to talk like a five-year-old. Children were randomly paired with a play partner who either reciprocated or did not reciprocate self-disclosing conversation, and behavioral and evaluative] reactions were measured. Results indicated that children paired with a non-reciprocating partner became less persistent in their self-disclosing initiations over time. Children paired with a reciprocating partner self-disclosed at similar levels throughout the interaction. Evaluative differences were also found. Children paired with a non-reciprocating partner rated the unfamiliar peer significantly lower than children paired with a partner who reciprocated self-disclosure. Based on these findings, it was concluded that young children are differentially sensitive to the self-disclosing behavior of unfamiliar conversation partners, and that they use participation in self-disclosure as a gauge for establishing initial connections with unfamiliar partners. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

Linguistics has developed elaborate accounts of the <u>social</u> aspects of language use - 'how to do things with words' - but the <u>emotional-dynamic</u> aspects have hitherto received less attention. Such discussions of emotive or affective meaning as there have been have tended to concentrate on the linguistic resources that are coded into the language system, rather than the dynamics of emotional interaction enacted through language use. The clinical discipline of Kleinian psychoanalysis, by contrast, has made emotional dynamics its central concern. Furthermore the main tool of the psychoanalyst's trade is the verbal interpretation of the patient's material, much of which is itself verbal. These factors have led to the development in Kleinian psychodynamic theory of a particularly rich vocabulary for understanding emotional-dynamic interaction, and specifically those aspects which are verbally enacted. The goal of this thesis is to outline a linguistic theory of emotional dynamics based on insights derived from Kleinian psychoanalysis. It aims to extrapolate from a clinical context Kleinian ideas that can be integrated with those of the school of Linguistic thought that has emphasised the dynamic aspects of locally-managed discourse meaning.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics & Psychology, Department of Linguistics, 2006. / Bibliography: p. 319-326. / Introduction: the complex tale of self in psychotherapy -- Literature review -- Introduction to the corpora and general linguistic analysis -- Introduction to the lexicogrammatical analysis of scripts, chronicles and narratives -- Chronicles: this is my normality: the complex tale of the everyday -- Scripts: I am not normal: the complex tale of alienation -- Narratives: this is how I would like normal to be: the complex tale of normality as imagination and memory -- A complex tale of normality: lexicogrammatical features across scripts, chronicles and narratives -- The contexts of psychotherapy -- Generic structure -- A complex tale of self. / This thesis investigates the complex tales of self which emerge from conversations between psychotherapists and patients with borderline personality disorder. These patients struggle in establishing a border between themselves and significant others, which is itself fundamental to a deeper construal of their own existence. They are being treated within the Conversational Model of psychotherapy. The model is strongly oriented to techniques based on language and linguistic evidence and thus offers a linguistic site at which the study of the complex interaction of self and language can be made tractable.--Within a broad corpus of transcribed audio recordings of patient-therapist discourse, the principal focus of my linguistic study is the Conversational Model's claims about three conversational types-Scripts, Chronicles and Narratives. According to Meares, they present 'self as shifting state in the therapeutic conversation' (1998:876). The thesis investigates a selection of texts to represent these three conversational types, which I have chosen according to the claims in the Conversational Model literature. It tests the evidence of Meares' claims concerning the semantic characteristics which distinguish the three conversational types, as well as the linguistic evidence concerning the claims of change in the self in particular the presentation of 'self as shifting state' (1998:876). To achieve the levels of complexity required for this linguistic study of self, this thesis uses Systemic Functional Linguistics, which has a social, interactional orientation and a multidimensional and in particular, multistratal approach. The research demonstrates that therapeutically relevant aspects of the self can be productively described, across linguistic strata, in a consistent and reproducible way as a construction of meaning. The meanings which speakers offer in wordings can provide a reliable index for evaluating the emergence and maintenance of self. The Conversational Model's 'conversations' are confirmed as linguistically distinguishable text types and the research further shows that key terms of the Conversational Model can be defended theoretically on the basis of linguistic evidence, for example, the contrastive linearlnon-linear. Together the findings describe the complexity in the tale of self.--This investigation of the Conversational Model data also tests the claims of a functional linguistics at the same time that it evaluates the Conversational Model with respect to that model's consistent appeals to language as evidence. It establishes an opportunity to extend the dialogue between linguists and practitioners of the Conversational Model: the tools of the one group increase the reflective capabilities of the other. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / xx, 385 p. ill