89 research outputs found
Exploration of the Detectable Structure of Social Episodes: The Parsing of Interaction Specimens
Body synchrony in triadic interaction
© 2020 The Authors. Humans subtly synchronize body movement during face-to-face conversation. In this context, bodily synchrony has been linked to affiliation and social bonding, task success and comprehension, and potential conflict. Almost all studies of conversational synchrony involve dyads, and relatively less is known about the structure of synchrony in groups larger than two. We conducted an optic flow analysis of body movement in triads engaged in face-to-face conversation, and explored a common measure of synchrony: time-aligned bodily covariation. We correlated this measure of synchrony with a diverse set of covariates related to the outcome of interactions. Triads showed higher maximum cross-correlation relative to a surrogate baseline, and ‘meta-synchrony’, in that composite dyads in a triad tended to show correlated structure. A windowed analysis also revealed that synchrony varies widely across an interaction. As in prior studies, average synchrony was low but statistically reliable in just a few minutes of interaction. In an exploratory analysis, we investigated the potential function of body synchrony by predicting it from various covariates, such as linguistic style matching, liking, laughter and cooperative play in a behavioural economic game. Exploratory results do not reveal a clear function for synchrony, though colaughter within triads was associated with greater body synchrony, and is consistent with an earlier analysis showing a positive connection between colaughter and cooperation. We end by discussing the importance of expanding and codifying analyses of synchrony and assessing its function.Support for original data collection and analysis provided by an International Society for Human Ethology
grant to M.M.G., and a UCLA Faculty Research grant to J.H.M
Do film cuts facilitate the perceptual and cognitive organization of activitiy sequences?
- …