The interactivity of ‘pauses’ - Cognitive exploration (exploitation) of enabling conditions for change

Description

This paper seeks to investigate features of pauses in relation to the psychotherapeutic process.
Though pauses as part of conversing are often taken for granted, the phenomenon of pauses in relation
to certain situations and activity types has in recent years been subject for in-depth analysis.
Investigations within interaction studies, have shown how pauses, though often comprehended as
non-speech, are far from instances of non-action.
Pauses are interactive domains of social behaviour, and thus the co-activity of pauses serves as
constituting speech. As such, a pause does not only belong to one individual - they are collaborative
endeavours of the dialogical system. And as such they are indeed sense-saturated coordination of
actions.
Pauses are considered a vital tool in psychotherapy. This paper will provide a brief overview of, what
the function of pauses can be in this specific activity type. This will involve an investigation of what
the constituents of pauses are; and how the pauses serve as enabling conditions for the cognitive
process in a case of psychotherapeutic practice. Insisting on an ecological perspective, this
investigation relies not only on the sequential and multimodal features, but also the meso-structural
features of pauses in relation to other kinds of sense-saturated activities.
The paper will hypothesize that pauses play a vital role in integrating emotion and cognition and
hence in integrating the transformative forces laid forward, prompted or otherwise afforded by the
therapeutic process. In here lies the assumption, that emotions as emotive constraints are indeed a
vital part of any cognitive endeavour. In every reasoning, in every choice of path, in solution seeking
or in problem identifying, which indeed can be understood as cognitive activity, it all comes down to
taking a stance. The pause's role in integrating is thus a negotiation of the stance rationale.

Period	1. Aug 2018 → 6. Aug 2018
Event type	Conference
Conference number	4
Location	Honolulu, United States, Hawaii
Degree of Recognition	International