What role does emotion play in everyday talk? One view is this: You're having a perfectly normal conversation, and everything goes along just fine until some emotion disrupts things. You're talking about work with a friend and you happen to mention a sensitive topic (such as how he just lost his job), and he gets upset. He says something insulting to you (such as how you don't really deserve yours), and you have a hard time maintaining your composure. Another person enters the room and tells you that he has been offered a job (though one you know is not very good). He is thrilled. Talk to him? Forget it. There is no way you can carry on a rational conversation now. He is too emotional.

As Cochran and Claspell (1987: 2) say: “Emotion lurks about upsetting well-ordered lives, disrupting rationality, and dividing a person with paltry and degenerate demands.… An emotion is a commotion.” Most of the time we are free of emotion; it rarely occurs in everyday conversation, and blessedly so. When an emotion does occur such as when one person yells at another, someone “breaks down” in tears, or laughs “hysterically,” it is a BIG DEAL! “Tears are stupid, tears are childish, tears are a sign of weakness, important people don't cry, clever people don't cry” (Carmichael, 1991: 186). Normal patterns of interaction stop when emotion erupts, and everyone responds one way or another. We may confront the feelings, try to cope with them, or try to pretend that they didn't happen (as we do with many social disruptions). What we are unlikely to do, however, is to take the emotion into account and continue to talk, make decisions, and go about our business.

Yet there is another view of the role that emotion plays in everyday conversation. Emotion is what gives communication life. A conversation between emotionally involved partners is bright and lively, but a meeting without feeling is deadly dull.