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.