SENTENCIA DE VISTA

For social workers in the study, a key dimension of the PN was what will be referred to as ‘emotional congruence.’ There were two strands to this: Firstly, social workers attended not only to the parent’s verbal narrative but also their affective narrative; the changing emotions expressed by the parent during the telling of their story. Social workers used the parent’s affective narrative (non-verbal responses which were suggestive of the parent’s emotions) as a gauge of truthfulness, attending to the level of consistency between what the parent said and accompanying expressed emotion. Secondly, social workers considered the appropriateness of the parent’s expression of emotion – whether the parent was worried

enough (whether there was congruence between the situation and the parent’s response) in

relation to the situation as an indicator of risk.

Observing the parent’s affective narrative

Social workers described attending to the parent’s affective narrative throughout the initial home visit. The affective narrative – the parallel story played out non-verbally in the

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parent’s expressions and body language – provided the social worker with an emotional ‘story’. Workers described closely observing the parent’s body language in order to ascertain how the parent might be feeling at various moments during the discussion. For instance, one social worker noted that during the home visit “Mum seemed really, really nervous” because she was:

very fiddly, very fidgety, she… had things in her hands. She was fiddling with her bracelets and a couple of small kid’s toys, like cars and so on. She seemed quite nervous about things.

Another social worker described attending carefully to instances where the parent’s generally “quite relaxed” presentation shifted slightly as she told her story:

There were times when – you could see her sort of tense up and things like that, sort of within her shoulders.

These subtle physical signs provided social workers with information about the parent’s emotional state in relation to the topic under discussion. The affective narrative sometimes provided the worker with a story which contradicted the parent’s verbal account. Attending to the subtle nuances of the affective narrative helped the social worker to a) respond sensitively to the parent’s distress (discussed in detail in chapter seven) and b) to gauge the truthfulness of their words.

Consistency between the parent’s verbal and affective narrative

When observing the parent tell their story social workers looked for consistency between the verbal narrative given by the parent and the emotions expressed in their body language. Where the parent’s affective narrative appeared to ‘match’, or appeared consistent, with the verbal narrative, this was taken to be an indicator of truthfulness. As one social worker concluded:

I think what she was saying matched with her facial expression. In another interview, a social worker made a similar observation:

I just got a feeling that actually she was telling the truth… She seemed quite, quite genuine with the emotions that she was portraying, it didn’t sort of, didn’t – the tearfulness didn’t look put on at all.

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In this example, the social worker acknowledges the possibility that a parent might deliberately feign (“put on”) distress in order to influence the assessment. In this case, the social worker supports her judgement that the parent was telling the truth with the notion that the accompanying emotion, expressed in the parent’s body language, appeared to her as “genuine.” Similarly, in the following example, a social worker linked the perceived veracity of the parent’s words to the accompanying emotional tone:

Researcher: How did you feel about that when she [the mother] was saying those things?

SW: I was inclined to believe that she meant them. She certainly seemed very genuine and very heartfelt.

An account which seemed ‘heartfelt’ contrasted other instances in the research interviews where social workers noted inconsistency between the parent’s words and the accompanying expressed emotion. For instance, one social worker noted a theatrical aspect to a parent’s distress during their conversation, describing her crying as “highly dramatised”.

A potential pitfall of this gauge of truthfulness is the ever-present possibility that the parent may be particularly skilled in feigning emotions in order to appear to the social worker as “heartfelt” or “genuine.” In fact, many social workers in the study were acutely aware of this possibility. Consistency alone was rarely treated as a categorical indicator of truthfulness. Where social workers described their ‘feeling’ (from observing and listening to the parent telling their story) that the parent was telling the truth, they were careful to balance this more intuitive impression with information from other sources:

The tearfulness didn’t look put on at all. It did seem to all match-up with the information that we had… There’s always a bit of me that says you know, take it with a pinch of salt, and I was quite blunt with her about that and said you know, look, we will double-check everything you’re saying, you know …the decision we’re giving you here is based on what you’re telling us, but if we… find out any different in our checks then you know, it may well be a very different decision.

In this example the social worker described her sense of consistency between verbal and affective information, leading her to conclude that the parent was telling the truth. However, she also emphasised the need to take “with a pinch of salt” this hypothesis, which remained open and subject to possible change in the light of further information. In this example, the social worker describes explaining this to the parent, adopting a stance similar to what Laming refers to as ‘respectful uncertainty’ (Laming, 2003: 205).

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