Abstract
Conversational interactions contribute not only to the sharing of information and
establishment of consensus but also to the construction and sustenance of mutual trust
among conversational participants in our daily lives. The interrelationship between
trust and conversational interactions has not been studied extensively in cognitive sci-
ence. One reason for this lack of research is the fact that a study of social emotions such
as trust requires real fields, since social emotions in their natural, non-artificial forms
are not readily observable in laboratory settings. We introduce a notion of concern
alignment to describe the surface conversational processes toward mutual trust forma-
tion. Focusing on medical communications as our research field, we collected health
guidance conversations between nurses and patients who were diagnosed as having
metabolic syndrome, and we provide a qualitative analysis of the structure of conver-
sations in terms of a set of dialogue acts we propose for the description of concern
alignment processes. We demonstrate that the idea of concern alignment enables us to
capture and elucidate both the local and the global structures of mutual trust formation
in conversational consensus-building processes. We also discuss underlying mechanisms
connecting concern alignment and mutual trust.
