Empathy displays as interactional achievements—Multimodal and sequential aspects

• Empathy refers to displays of understanding of another person's emotional situation.
• Empathy displays evolve in interaction over time, in specific sequential positions.
• Resources to display empathy range from kinetic/‘fleeting’ to verbal/‘substantial’.
• Empathy displays can be conceptualized on an apprehension–comprehension continuum.

In this conversation analytic/interactional linguistic study, I aim to show which kinds of resources can be used by participants to display empathy in response to affect-laden tellings of personal experiences in German everyday interaction. ‘Empathy’ refers to the display of understanding of the other person's emotional situation. It will be shown that a whole range of resources such as facial expressions, response cries + assessments, expressions with mental verbs, formulations, and second stories can be used, and that these resources are deployed at specific sequential positions, and in a specific order from kinetic and ‘fleeting’ to verbal and ‘substantial’, in the course of the telling of a personal experience.