Embodied Interaction in Mental Health Consultations: Some Observations on Grounding and Repair

Jing Hui Law, Patrick Healey, Rosella Galindo Esparza


Abstract
Shared physical space is an important resource for face-to-face interaction. People use the position and orientation of their bodies—relative to each other and relative to the physical environment—to determine who is part of a conversation, to manage conversational roles (e.g. speaker, addressee, side-participant) and to help co-ordinate turn-taking. These embodied uses of shared space also extend to more fine-grained aspects of interaction, such as gestures and body movements, to support topic management, orchestration of turns and grounding. This paper explores the role of embodied resources in (mis)communication in a corpus of mental health consultations. We illustrate some of the specific ways in which clinicians and patients can exploit embodiment and the position of objects in shared space to diagnose and manage moments of misunderstanding.
Anthology ID:
2022.clasp-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 CLASP Conference on (Dis)embodiment
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Julian Grove, Asad Sayeed
Venue:
CLASP
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51–61
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clasp-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Hui Law, Patrick Healey, and Rosella Galindo Esparza. 2022. Embodied Interaction in Mental Health Consultations: Some Observations on Grounding and Repair. In Proceedings of the 2022 CLASP Conference on (Dis)embodiment, pages 51–61, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Embodied Interaction in Mental Health Consultations: Some Observations on Grounding and Repair (Law et al., CLASP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clasp-1.6.pdf