This chapter continues the discursive respecification of psychological notions elsewhere in this book by looking at the rhetorical and situational use of emotion categories in institutional decision making. Using videotaped data from meetings between social and health care professionals, I examine how members in interprofessional teams either invoke, describe and display their own feelings or ascribe them to other people: their clients or other professionals. The chapter shows how reference to emotions, embedded in ongoing narration and description, functions as practical discursive resources for institutional action and non-action: as part and parcel of the process whereby decisions are negotiated, rationalised and justified. The aim of this chapter is thus to move psychology from the realm of cognitive processing by placing emotion discourse firmly into the social, interactional arena.

In the first part of the chapter 1 outline some earlier work on emotion in interaction as well as empirical studies on meeting interaction and decision making that my own analyses build on. After introducing the data and the setting in which they were collected, I then proceed first to look at the discursive uses of concern constructions in meeting talk. I will argue that ascription of concern to other people in talk – third-party concern constructions – functions as a recurrent means of establishing direction for practical decision making.