Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction

In this article, I am concerned with the description and transcription of crying. I consider the ways crying has been dealt with in general psychological research and in interactional research. In general psychological research, crying has typically been studied by way of self-report questionnaires that treat crying as a unitary and self-evident category. Although interaction work is more focused on the interactional role of crying, it is uncommon for transcription to try and capture its different elements. Taking off from Jefferson's (1985) work on laughing and using a corpus of phone calls to a child protection helpline, I attempt in this article to make explicit some different elements of crying and to show how these elements can be represented in transcript. In particular, I consider the nature and representation of whispering, sniffing, wobbly voice, high pitch, aspiration, sobbing, and silence. I make suggestions as to how each of these can be transcribed. In the article, I make some observations about the similarities and differences between laughing and crying and start to identify some of the interactional features associated with crying.