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In preventive health-care settings, professionals need to encourage clients to talk about their problems before they become critical. We use multimodal conversation analysis to demonstrate how public health nurses encourage parents to elaborate on their problems in a sample of preventive maternity and child health (MCH) clinics in Finland. The nurses topicalize the problem-relevant aspects of the parents’ problem-indicative talk by issuing a formulation of what the parent has just said (that is, by redescribing it in problem-related terms). This verbal practice is synchronized with a visual one—the nurse issues the formulation, receives the parent's response, and then gazes directly at them. This has the effect of prompting the parent to take up the problem and talk about it. We discuss the findings in relation to the institutional tasks in MCH care and to the role of gaze in constituting actions, such as formulations. Data are in Finnish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uses of formulation in cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were compared, by means of conversation analysis, using 53 audio-recorded sessions as data. Two formulation types were found in both approaches:highlighting formulations, which recycle the client's descriptions and recognize therapeutically dense material, andrephrasing formulations, which offer the therapist's version of the client's description and focus on subjective experiences. These formulations may be interactional bearers ofcommon factorsin psychotherapy. Two other formulation types were exclusive to one or another approach.Relocating formulations, found only in psychoanalysis, propose that the experiences in the client's narratives are connected to experiences at other times or places.Exaggerating formulations, found only in cognitive psychotherapy, exaggerate the client's talk by recasting it as something that is apparently implausible. The contrast between relocating and exaggerating formulations suggests that, despite recent theories in the two approaches being more compatible, interactional differences still exist between cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]