Abstract
We report on what, to our knowledge, represents the first study of nonverbal emotional behavior in crowded public places combining naturalistic videotaping of situated activity, objective coding of facial movement, and sequential analysis of behavior. In the first part of the study we argue that passengers do not lose emotional sensitivity to physical contact as density (passengers per square meter) increases, which indicates that physical contact is experienced as a territorial intrusion regardless of crowdedness. In the second part of the study, we suggest that passengers resolve the emotions due to intrusive physical contacts through two interactional strategies involving facial movements usually interpreted as “expressions of emotions.” Since proxemic violations seem to represent a pervasive emotion elicitor, the protocol can be extended to other means of transportation and replicated in other locations. We conclude that the methodology provides an effective tool for theory-building in the study of nonverbal emotional behavior.
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Notes
Pragmatist philosopher C. S. Pierce called them “abductive”. See Fann (1970) for an account of Peirce’s thoughts about abduction.
According to data released by the RATP, traffic increased over 25 % between 2000 and 2011, reaching a high yearly number of 1,500 million travels.
Situations described as “unpleasant” were identified by searching instances of the following adjectives (usually employed ironically): agréable, plaisant, jouissif. Situations described as “annoying” were spotted through uses of the reflexive verb: s’énerver.
Only seven messages describe the situation as “unpleasant” or “annoying” and at the same time make reference to retaliatory response.
Each videotaping session lasted for about 90 min. The duration was limited by the battery life of the camera.
Goffman calls such expressions “body gloss” because they provide additional information about the relationship that the offender has to the norms. The body gloss, by conveying to the others present that the offender herself sees her conduct as offensive, makes the transgression more excusable or less severe than if the offender proceeded as nothing had happened.
In this study the probability of a touch in a dyad was defined as the quotient of the number of times that at least one touch was seen during an observation period divided by the number of observation periods, a probability that turned out to be around 15 % (Hall and Veccia 1990, p. 1157).
That is, we did not count all observable contacts and then calculated the ratio of contacts followed by facial responses. Neither did we consider facial changes that were not preceded by observable physical contacts.
In mathematics, a bijection or one-to-one correspondence is a function giving an exact pairing of the elements of two sets. By analogy, a bijective contact incident involves one author of the contact and only one receiver. A non bijective incident, in contrast, involves one author and two or more receivers.
In the probabilistic analysis of rider exchange units, as we calculated density and searched for occurrences of at least one contact incident, we made side notes on some interactional events, including some forms of conspicuous courtesy or hostility between strangers.
For example, in contrast to the US, where traffic lights are sometimes equipped with a countdown, in France traffic lights for pedestrians only alternate between red and green. Without knowing at what stage of the countdown the red light may come, pedestrians sometimes attempt to cross the road anyway. If they are unfortunately caught by a green light for the cars in the middle of the road, they often signal their acknowledgement of the transgression to the impatient drivers by an exaggerated trot accompanied by ostensible expressions of surprise. The purely ritual meaning of the trot is revealed by occasions in which no apparent pace acceleration ensues, as compared to just walking.
The two streams were synchronized with the program Elan (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, n.d.) using for each pair of files, as a common point of reference, the moment when the doors close.
Keltner’s prototype includes, in order or appearance: gaze down, smile control (e.g., lip press), smile, head away, gaze shifts.
An event using one of these ad hoc categories is, for example, “Patient looks Author”. In all the cases in which the code looks was attributed to the patient, we based the attribution on 1) a previously attributed head and eye movement descriptor as defined by the FACS and 2) a reasonable guess about what the patient was looking at. If we thought that patient was looking at author, but no head and eye movement could be coded, the look itself was not coded.
In order to specify who was the patient (the person receiving the contact) and who was the author of the contact, we used the codes “cp” and “ca”. If the individual taken as the point of reference was the patient, the contact event was coded “cp”; if she was the author, it was coded “ca”. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows we use the expression “physical contact”, but the type of event to which reference is made is more precisely “cp”.
For these t-patterns the program Theme® was set at significance level 0.0001.
Combining systematic coding and perception of behavioral configurations (or wholes) is one of the usual descriptive procedures of classical ethology (Lorenz 2003).
Some researchers claim that the asymmetric AU14 is the universal contempt expression (Ekman and Friesen 1986; Ekman and Heider 1988), but the symmetric and asymmetric appearances of AU14 occupy the same sequential slots in the behavior patterns that we found. Hence, there is nothing in these patterns that could indicate a different meaning for each appearance of AU14.
In order to constrain the inevitable arbitrariness of time window duration, we took the duration of the longest t-pattern as the point of reference for this backward-looking time window.
We refrained from using a more stringent sequential association analysis because we were less interested in establishing causal links than in finding descriptive similarities between p3 and p4.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Results of the Probabilistic Analysis at Montparnasse Station
Probability of a contact incident of each type according to density on the platform and on the train at Montparnasse station, morning rush hour (8:00–9:30 a.m.). p-id (probabilité d’incident de descente): probability of a contact incident between two riders getting off the train; p-idm (probabilité d’incident de descente-montée): probability of a contact incident between a rider getting off and a rider getting on the train; p-im (probabilité d’incident de montée): probability of a contact incident between two riders getting on the train.; d: density of walking riders in persons per square meter in the train and on the platform next to the door; 1 ≤ d < 1.5: density is equal or higher than 1 person per square meter and lower than 1.5 persons per square meter
Probability of a contact incident according to density onboard at Montparnasse station, morning rush hour (8:00–9:30 a.m.)
Appendix 2: Rationale of T-Patterns Analysis
The analysis of t-patterns was guided by a comparison of t-patterns p3 and p4, respectively ending with AU14 and AUa14. The first step consisted in examining overlaps between shorter and longer t-patterns. Occurrences of two different t-patterns overlap if they share the first component, i.e. if they begin with the same coded event. The analysis revealed that all occurrences of p4 overlap with occurrences of p2. This means that p4’s third component, P,turns_head, occurs nearly at the same time as p2’s third component, P,looks_A.
The terminal component of p4 is P,a14, the whole t-pattern being 6 components long. Similarly, p3 ends with AU14, but it involves only 3 components. The maximum length of p4 is 9 s and, as we saw, it always overlaps with p2. By analogy, we considered the last component of p3 (P,14) as the last component of a hypothetical 6-component t-pattern. At the time at which this component occurred, we opened a time window of 9 s (p4’s maximum duration, see table aboveFootnote 20) backward and looked for occurrences of p2. We considered instances of p3 to be “closely preceded” by instances of p2 if: (1) the first component of p2 occurred no more than 9 s before the last component of p3; (2) p2 ended before p3 begun.
We verified the relationship for 9 instances of p3 (minimum distance between initial component of p2 and terminal component of p3: 1.9 s; maximum: 8.6).Footnote 21
For the remaining occurrences of p3, we examined if they were closely preceded by p1. As the resulting sequence would be 5 components long instead of 6, we shortened the time window proportionally from 9 to 7.5 s. We found 9 such associations between these t-patterns (minimum time distance 0.6; maximum 2.5). Overall, 18/24 instances of p3 appear to be closely preceded by instances of p1 or of p2.
We then compared occurrences of p4 with these occurrences of p3. The latter always involve at least two physical contact events. Could it suggest that instances of p4 also relate to more than one contact? We say that the occurrence of a t-pattern “contains” the occurrence of another t-pattern if the time coordinates of instances of the first one, singly considered, cover a period of time longer than the second one. In this sense, p4 contains p2, but the reverse is not true. In order to verify whether p4 was related to more than one contact, we examined whether p4 contained, after p2, also p1. We admitted instances of p1 that: (1) begun after p2’s terminal component (P,looks_A); (2) ended before p4’s terminal component (P,a14).
Four out of six instances of p4 were found to contain a p2 followed by a p1. The concrete correlates of these instances therefore involved two physical contacts.
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Aranguren, M., Tonnelat, S. Emotional Transactions in the Paris Subway: Combining Naturalistic Videotaping, Objective Facial Coding and Sequential Analysis in the Study of Nonverbal Emotional Behavior. J Nonverbal Behav 38, 495–521 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0193-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0193-1