Disagreement, mitigation and empathy in professors' office hours

Abstract

The study of empathy has become a centre of interest for many interrelated disciplines, whose contributions have started to shed some light on the way this capacity manifests in an array of situations from a linguistic and paralinguistic point of view. Within the framework of institutional discourse, this paper analyses the role of empathy in professors’ office hours, a genre defined by specific features that arise from the hierarchical inequality between the professor and the student. More specifically, the qualitative analysis of a corpus of 20 recordings of office hours focuses on the mitigation strategies through which empathy can manifest in those cases where professors disagree with their students. The results show that the way in which professors position themselves in relation to their institutional role, which answers to the nature of each topic under discussion, determines the presence or absence of mitigation strategies which convey empathy. In this sense, when professors adopt a distinct institutional role, empathy remains at a cognitive level and does not become affective. Through the detailed analysis of these manifestations, this paper applies previous findings of research on empathy and on how it relates to mitigation to a specific context and language to contribute to the study of this phenomenon.