Prof. Dr. Anssi Peräkylä

CV

Anssi Peräkylä is Academy Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland.  He received his PhD from the University of London in 1992. Since then, his research topics have incluced AIDS counselling, primary care medical consultations, psychotherapy interaction, and diagnostic interviews in psychiatry. He has investigated different facets of emotion in social interaction, especially facial expressions and physiological responses.  He uses conversation analysis as method, and his research questions are inspired by Goffman's sociology.  Alongside conversation analysis, he uses experimental methods. His current work focuses on self in social interaction, and in particular, the intersection of interaction practices and narcissistic personality traits.

Publikationen

• PERÄKYLÄ, A. (2015) From narcissism to face work: two views on the self in social interaction. American Journal of Sociology 121(2): 445-74.
• PERÄKYLÄ, A., HENTTONEN, P., VOUTILAINEN, L., KAHRI, M., STEVANOVIC, M., SAMS, M. & RAVAJA, N. (2015) Sharing the Emotional Load: Recipient Affiliation Calms Down the Storyteller. Social Psychology Quarterly 78(4):301-323.
• PERÄKYLÄ, A. & BERGMANN, J. (2020)  Practices of joint meaning creation. Dreams in psychoanalytic discussion.  International Journal of Psychoanalysis. E-pub ahead of print:  https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2020.1775088
• KOSKINEN, E., STEVANOVIC, M., & PERÄKYLÄ, A. (2021). The Recognition and Interactional Management of Face Threats: Comparing Neurotypical Participants and Participants with Asperger's Syndrome. Social Psychology Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725211003023
• PERÄKYLÄ, A., VOUTILAINEN, L., LEHTINEN, M. & WUOLIO, M. (2021) From engagement to disengagement in a psychiatric assessment process.  Symbolic Interaction 45(2):257-296. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.574

FRIAS Projekt

Facing Narcissism: Grandiosity and vulnerability of the self in the social world

Taking up a classical sociological theme regarding the interactional constitution of self, Erving Goffman proposed that in all ordinary social encounters, the mutual recognition of the social value of the participants’ selves – what Goffman called face – is the participants’ omnipresent concern. My research will establish a new perspective to investigate face, self and social interaction, by focusing on persons with narcissistic problems. It is the key presumption of my study that the narcissistic self-experience sets in high relief the dynamics between self and social interaction, facilitating a new perspective to the sociology of the self.

The overall goal of my research is to find out how the self-experience in narcissism shapes interactional practices. The research to be conducted in FRIAS is the final part of five-year (2019- 2023) research project consisting of empirical studies on narcissism and face work in informal conversations and in clinical encounters, as well as on the psychophysiological and neural responses associated to narcissism. The empirical studies being close to completion, my task in FRIAS will be to synthetize their results and to contextualize them in the sociological, psychological and clinical theories of self and narcissism.