Audience spontaneous entrainment during the collective enjoyment of live performances: physiological and behavioral measurements

Cardiac synchrony is a crucial component of shared experiences, considered as an objective measure of emotional processes accompanying empathic interactions. No study has investigated whether cardiac synchrony among people engaged in collective situations links to the individual emotional evaluation of the shared experience. We investigated theatrical live performances as collective experiences evoking strong emotional engagement in the audience. Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis was applied to obtain the cardiac synchrony of twelve spectators’ quartets attending to two live acting performances. This physiological measure was then correlated with spectators’ emotional intensity ratings. Results showed an expected increment in synchrony among people belonging to the same quartet during both performances attendance and rest periods. Furthermore, participants’ cardiac synchrony was found to be correlated with audience’s convergence in the explicit emotional evaluation of the performances they attended to. These findings demonstrate that the mere co-presence of other people sharing a common experience is enough for cardiac synchrony to occur spontaneously and that it increases in function of a shared and coherent explicit emotional experience

Relationship between cardiac cycle and the timing of actions during action execution and observation

Previous research suggests that there may be a relationship between the timing of motor events and phases of the cardiac cycle. This relationship has thus far only been researched using simple isolated movements such as key-presses in reaction-time tasks and only in a single subject acting alone. Other research has shown both movement and cardiac coordination among interacting individuals. Here, we investigated how the cardiac cycle relates to ongoing self-paced movements in both action execution and observation using a novel dyadic paradigm. We recorded electrocardiography (ECG) in 26 subjects who formed 19 dyads containing an action executioner and observer as they performed a self-paced sequence of movements. We demonstrated that heartbeats are timed to movements during both action execution and observation. Specifically, movements were less likely to culminate synchronously with the heartbeat around the time of the R-peak of the ECG. The same pattern was observed for action observation, with the observer's heartbeats occurring off-phase with movement culmination. These findings demonstrate that there is coordination between an action executioner's cardiac cycle and the timing of their movements, and that the same relationship is mirrored in an observer. This suggests that previous findings of interpersonal coordination may be caused by the mirroring of a phasic relationship between movement and the heart

Collective emotions and joint action : beyond received and minimalist approaches

In contemporary philosophy of collective intentionality, emotions, feelings, moods, and sentiments do not figure prominently in debates on the explanation and justification of joint action. Received philosophical theories analyze joint action in terms of common knowledge of cognitively complex, interconnected structures of intentions and action plans of the participants. These theories admit that collective emotions sometimes give rise to joint action or more typically, unplanned and uncoordinated collective behavior that falls short of full-fledged jointly intentional action. In contrast, minimalist theorists pay some attention to affective elements in joint action without much concern about their collective intentionality. They refer to an association between low-level synchrony in perceptual, motor, and behavioral processes, and increased interpersonal liking, feelings of solidarity, and cooperativeness. In this paper, we outline an account of collective emotions that can bridge this theoretical divide, linking the intentional structure of joint actions and the underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms. Collective emotions can function as both motivating and justifying reasons for jointly intentional actions, in some cases even without prior joint intentions of the participants. Moreover, they facilitate coordination in joint action.Peer reviewe

Verbal Synchrony and Action Dynamics in Large Groups

While synchronized movement has been shown to increase liking and feelings of togetherness between people, we investigated whether collective speaking in time would change the way that larger groups played a video game together. Anthropologists have speculated that the function of interpersonal coordination in dance, chants, and singing is not just to produce warm, affiliative feelings, but also to improve group action. The group that chants and dances together hunts well together. Direct evidence for this is sparse, as research so far has mainly studied pairs, the effects of coordinated physical movement, and measured cooperation and affiliative decisions. In our experiment, large groups of people were given response handsets to play a computer game together, in which only joint coordinative efforts lead to success. Before playing, the synchrony of their verbal behavior was manipulated. After the game, we measured group members’ affiliation toward their group, their performance on a memory task, and the way in which they played the group action task. We found that verbal synchrony in large groups produced affiliation, enhanced memory performance, and increased group members’ coordinative efforts. Our evidence suggests that the effects of synchrony are stable across modalities, can be generalized to larger groups and have consequences for action coordination

Shared Creativity and Flow in Dance Improvisation Practice

This thesis investigated shared creative processes and the role of flow experience in group dance improvisation. A literature review suggested that dancers associate high-quality performance with 'being in the flow', and that group flow is a peak experience when a group is performing at its highest level. The first study explored the role of flow in dance creative practice and improvisation through qualitative content analysis of individual interviews with six dancers. Absorption with activity and enjoyment were themes in dancers' reports of flow. Group improvisation facilitated flow and creativity through maintaining desired focus for longer, lowering self-judgment and inspiring novel solutions. The second study investigated the occurrence of flow and its shared character within group improvisation using video-stimulated recall and questionnaire methods (n=16, 4 groups of four dancers). It showed that group flow was rather rare and it was more likely when a group had worked together for longer. Dancers reported that a group in a high-flow state engaged with a task in a more complex way, sharing, transforming and supporting each other's ideas, while low-flow groups worked more with mimicry and bodily manipulation. Dancers perceived tasks performed in a high-flow state as more creative. The third study explored the relationship between dancers' flow experience and creative outcomes from a third person perspective. A total of 203 participants (77 experts and 126 nonexperts) rated excerpts of high- and low-flow dance improvisation (five each) using Consensual Assessment Technique. Experts judged high-flow collaborations as more creative, and more coherent, technically advanced, aesthetically appealing and meaningful, however there were no significant differences in nonexperts' ratings. The fourth study explored whether synchronous arousal, measured by cross-recurrence quantification analysis of heart and breathing rate, was a physiological basis for group flow (n=8 group, 4 dancers per group). Although no relationship between synchronous arousal and flow was found, spontaneous synchronization of dancers' heart and breathing rate in improvisational group tasks was observed, unrelated to synchronized activity. Overall, the studies conducted confirmed that flow was a highly creative state for dancers, in which they performed better. The presence of others and quality of group collaboration supported the occurrence and amount of flow. However, group flow occurred rarely and was more likely when a group had worked together for longer

Quantifying the interplay of conversational devices in building mutual understanding

Humans readily engage in idle chat and heated discussions and negotiate tough joint decisions without ever having to think twice about how to keep the conversation grounded in mutual understanding. However, current attempts at identifying and assessing the conversational devices that make this possible are fragmented across disciplines and investigate single devices within single contexts. We present a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate conversational devices, their relations, and how they adjust to contextual demands. In two corpus studies, we systematically test the role of three conversational devices: backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Contrasting affiliative and task-oriented conversations within participants, we find that conversational devices adaptively adjust to the increased need for precision in the latter: We show that low-precision devices such as backchannels are more frequent in affiliative conversations, whereas more costly but higher-precision mechanisms, such as specific repairs, are more frequent in task-oriented conversations. Further, task-oriented conversations involve higher complementarity of contributions in terms of the content and perspective: lower semantic entrainment and less frequent (but richer) lexical and syntactic entrainment. Finally, we show that the observed variations in the use of conversational devices are potentially adaptive: pairs of interlocutors that show stronger linguistic complementarity perform better across the two tasks. By combining motivated comparisons of several conversational contexts and theoretically informed computational analyses of empirical data the present work lays the foundations for a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the use of conversational devices in dialogue

Music and the Evolution of Embodied Cognition

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still available to us as contemporary music creators and consumers