Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014

Advances in video and time series analysis have greatly enhanced our ability to study the bodily synchronization that occurs in natural interactions. Past research has demonstrated that the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature. The present study investigated how the bodily synchronization in a joke telling task is spread across different nested temporal scales. Pairs of participants enacted knock-knock jokes and times series of their bodily activity were recorded. Coherence and relative phase analyses were used to evaluate the synchronization of bodily rhythms for the whole trial as well as at the subsidiary time scales of the whole joke, the setup of the punch line, the two-person exchange and the utterance. The analyses revealed greater than chance entrainment of the joke teller's and joke responder's movements at all time scales and that the relative phasing of the teller's movem...

Inputs-Outputs '13: Proceedings of the 2013 inputs-outputs conference: An interdisciplinary conference on engagement in HCI and performance, 2013

Social interaction is a core aspect of human life that affects individuals' physical and mental health. Social interaction usually leads to mutual engagement in diverse areas of cognitive, emotional, physiological and physical activity involving both interacting persons and subsequently impacting the outcome of these interactions. A common approach to the analysis of social interaction is the study of the verbal content transmitted between sender and receiver. However, additional important processes and dynamics are occurring in other domains too, for example in the area of nonverbal behaviour. In a series of studies, we have looked at interactional synchrony -- the coordination of two persons' movement patterns -- and its association with relationship quality and with the outcome of interactions. Using a computer-based algorithm, which automatically quantifies a person's body-movement, we were able to objectively calculate interactional synchrony in a large number of dyads interacting in various settings. In a first step, we showed that the phenomenon of interactional synchrony existed at a level that was significantly higher than expected by chance. In a second step, we ascertained that across different settings -- including patient-therapist dyads and healthy subject dyads -- more synchronized movement was associated with better relationship quality and better interactional outcomes. The quality of a relationship is thus embodied by the synchronized movement patterns emerging between partners. Our studies suggested that embodied cognition is a valuable approach to research in social interaction, providing important clues for an improved understanding of interaction dynamics.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Many group-living animals, humans included, occasionally synchronize their behavior with that of conspecifics. Social psychology and neuroscience has attempted to explain this phenomenon. Here we sought to integrate results around three themes: the stimuli, the mechanisms, and the benefits of interactional synchrony. As regards stimuli, we asked what characteristics, apart from temporal regularity, prompt synchronization and found that stimulus modality and complexity are important. The high temporal resolution of the auditory system and the relevance of socio-emotional information endow auditory, multi-modal, emotional and somewhat variable and adaptive sequences with particular synchronizing power. Looking at the mechanisms revealed that traditional perspectives emphasizing beat-based representations of others’ signals conflict with more recent work investigating the perception of temporal regularity. Timing processes supported by striato-cortical loops represent any kind of repet...

Our everyday interactions increasingly involve both embodied face-to-face communication and various forms of mediated and distributed communication such as email, skype, and facebook. In daily face-to-face commu- nications, we are connected in rhythm and synchrony at multiple levels ranging from the moment-by-moment continuity of timed syllables to emergent body and vocal rhythms of pragmatic sense-making. Our human capacity to synchronize with each other may be essential for our survival as social beings. Moving our bodies and voices together in time embodies a potent pragmatic purpose that of being together. In this synchrony of self with other, witnessing and being present become part of each other. There is growing research into how rhythm and synchrony operate in embodied face-to-face interaction and this provides parameters for investigating the relations and differences in how we connect and are socially present in the embodied and distributed settings, and understanding the effect of one setting upon the other. This paper explores the arena of research into rhythm in human interaction, musical and linguistic, with a focus on the movements of body and voice. It draws together salient issues and ideas that would form the basis for a framework of rhythm in embodied interaction.

Scientific Reports

An important open problem in Human Behaviour is to understand how coordination emerges in human ensembles. This problem has been seldom studied quantitatively in the existing literature, in contrast to situations involving dual interaction. Here we study motor coordination (or synchronisation) in a group of individuals where participants are asked to visually coordinate an oscillatory hand motion. We separately tested two groups of seven participants. We observed that the coordination level of the ensemble depends on group homogeneity, as well as on the pattern of visual couplings (who looked at whom). Despite the complexity of social interactions, we show that networks of coupled heterogeneous oscillators with different structures capture well the group dynamics. Our findings are relevant to any activity requiring the coordination of several people, as in music, sport or at work, and can be extended to account for other perceptual forms of interaction such as sound or feel.

Scientific Reports, 2021

Everyday social interactions require us to closely monitor, predict, and synchronise our movements with those of an interacting partner. Experimental studies of social synchrony typically examine the social-cognitive outcomes associated with synchrony, such as affiliation. On the other hand, research on the sensorimotor aspects of synchronisation generally uses non-social stimuli (e.g. a moving dot). To date, the differences in sensorimotor aspects of synchronisation to social compared to non-social stimuli remain largely unknown. The present study aims to address this gap using a verbal response paradigm where participants were asked to synchronise a ‘ba’ response in time with social and non-social stimuli, which were presented auditorily, visually, or audio-visually combined. For social stimuli a video/audio recording of an actor performing the same verbal ‘ba’ response was presented, whereas for non-social stimuli a moving dot, an auditory metronome or both combined were presente...

Abstract The study of interpersonal synchrony examines how interacting individuals grow to have similar behavior, cognition, and emotion in time. Many of the established methods of analyzing interpersonal synchrony are costly and time-consuming; the study of bodily synchrony has been especially laborious, traditionally requiring researchers to hand-code movement frame by frame. Because of this, researchers have been searching for more efficient alternatives for decades.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015

Social chemistry is a critical aspect of our life as human beings. We use our body to share information with others and to understand them. Recently, studies suggest that movement synchronization during social interaction might be important for social bonding. The current study aimed to understand how different features of movement influence both predictability and complexity of the interaction within dyads, assuming that both are inherent for successful social interaction. The experiment took place in four different round-robin sessions. The participants (98 pairs, comprised out of 33 individuals) played the "Mirror Game", in which they had to move their hands as coordinately as they could, without using verbal communication. After each game, the participants filled a questionnaire about their subjective experience and their impression of their partner. All sessions were filmed and preprocessed using motion energy analysis to extract a time-series representing participants' velocity throughout time. Using cross recurrence quantification analysis and cross-correlation, we found that the interplay between pausing and accelerating, as well as the amount of movements, determined the predictability (dyad movement synchronization) and complexity (entropy) of the interactions. More so, increased predictability and complexity were correlated with increased social bonding and mutual understanding. Thus, our findings suggest that the interplay between predictability and complexity of movement is important for successful non-verbal social interaction.

Intersubjectivity in Action, 2021

In this chapter, we consider movement synchrony from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we report a small-scale empirical study to test the hypothesis that movement synchrony is a sequential phenomenon, which serves as a demonstration of how conversation analytically informed research on participants' unconscious tendencies to synchronize their body movements could proceed in practice. On the other hand, we consider movement synchrony through three closely related, yet essentially different, conceptual lenses: conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, and affordance. We suggest that a specific combination of the insights provided by these three conceptual tools would make conversation analytically informed study of movement synchrony both possible and fruitful.