ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses with the psychological literature on complex emotion displays, such as coyness and embarrassment, that are suggested to occur in response to unwanted or excessive social attention, evaluations of the self, untoward predicaments and social faux-pas. It examines how these emotion displays are organised from the multimodal interaction perspective. This area has particular relevance in autism, since impairments in the capacity to understand and to display complex emotions, such as embarrassment, have been considered as one of the hallmarks of autism. To better understand such displays with autistic children, the chapter considers interactions with neurotypical participants where similar displays can occur in complex sequential environments. It focuses on the display of coyness in response to the teacher's questions from the data involving Liisa and Niko, respectively. A comparative case is presented from an interaction involving participants with typical development, Jesse and his grandmother, Krisse.
