Kurzbeschreibung
(Englisch)
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Conversational interactions are cooperatively constructed activities in which participants negotiate their entrances, turns and alignments with other speakers, oftentimes with an underlying long-term objective of obtaining some agreement. The degree of perceived agreement is known to be of importance in a variety of contexts, such as psychotherapeutic interac-tions, contractual negotiations or project evaluations. Part of the prosodic and gestural elements in a conversational inter-action can be interpreted as signals for the speaker's degree of agreement; they are thus of probable importance in the (non-) emergence of agreement in a conversational exchange. Our project will perform a technical and statistical verification to establish if a fully automatic visual and acoustic evaluation system is possible. Research verification will be performed of a series of dyadic exchanges. These exchanges will comprise cooperative and competitive conditions in a variant of the prisoners' dilemma game. N=70 dyads will be recruited for the behavioural experiments.
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Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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AT, BE, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GR, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LT, NL, NO, PL, PT, RS, SE, SI, SK, TR, UK
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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Social interactions in conversations are cooperatively structured activities by which interactands negotiate their entrances, turns and alignments with other speakers, often with an underlying long-term objective of obtaining agreement or communicating disagreement. Various prosodic and gestural elements can be interpreted as signals of a speaker's agreement or disagreement. Such elements play a prominent role in the emergence of an individual's understanding in conversational exchange. The main research objective of this project was to establish nonverbal indicators that capture the degree of agreement in a series of structured dyadic exchanges. These exchanges established active cooperation, competition and playful interaction by standardized tasks. The tasks consisted of discussions on general socio-political issues operationalizing different conditions (cooperation / competition / fun). Main study hypotheses were: Nonverbal synchrony - the coordination between movement behavior of two interactands - is present in these discussions (as compared to a surrogate control condition). Synchrony is higher in cooperation than conflict. The amount of synchrony is associated with sympathy ratings of interaction partners. Nonverbal synchrony is linked with personality, mood, demographical variables/covariates. N = 168 healthy participants were included, comprising 42 female and 42 male same-sex dyads. At this time, all data are available in the final database consisting of questionnaire data covering demographics, personality traits, empathy, interpersonal problems, psychopathological symptoms, attachment qualities, implicit self-worth, mood and sympathy assessments. Furthermore, a comprehensive set of parameters on nonverbal movement behavior (assessment of synchrony as well as global movement characteristics) was extracted with a computer algorithm from the videotaped interactions. This project has generated a large and integrative corpus of verbal, nonverbal and psychological data, which will be made available, subsequent to our own analyses, to the scientific community of COST 2102. We are currently working on the statistical evaluation of data. Interim analyses showed that nonverbal synchrony occurred at signi?cantly higher-than-chance levels ('proof of existence'). Synchrony was most pronounced in the fun-task interaction followed by competitive and cooperative conditions. Mood ratings were significantly linked to increased synchrony. High synchrony corresponded with a high post-interaction evaluation of sympathy for fellow-participants. Contrary to our hypotheses, no overall associations were found with personality measures. Ongoing analyses will address gender-specific responses, and differences in nonverbal movement patterns. Issues of nonverbal temporality (the duration of higher-than-random synchrony windows), and prosodic synchronization are currently being operationalized and refined.
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