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Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony

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Abstract

Past research has revealed that natural social interactions contain interactional synchrony. The present study describes new methods for measuring interactional synchrony in natural interactions and evaluates whether the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature. Two methodologies, a rater-coding method and a computational video image method, were used to provide time series representations of the movements of the co-actors as they enacted a series of jokes (i.e., knock–knock jokes). Cross-spectral and relative phase analyses of these time series revealed that speakers’ and listeners’ movements contained rhythms that were not only correlated in time but also exhibited phase synchronization. These results suggest that computational advances in video and time series analysis have greatly enhanced our ability to measure interactional synchrony in natural interactions. Moreover, the dynamical synchronization in these natural interactions is commensurate with that found in more stereotyped tasks, suggesting that similar organizational processes constrain bodily activity in natural social interactions and, hence, have implications for the understanding of joint action generally.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Awards BCS-0750187 and BCS-0750190 and Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant (Project SCAD # NT09_457350).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, College of the Holy Cross, Box 176A, 1 College St., Worcester, MA, 01610, USA

    R. C. Schmidt

  2. Department of Psychology, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, 01610, USA

    Samantha Morr

  3. Assumption College, Worcester, MA, USA

    Paula Fitzpatrick

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Michael J. Richardson

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  1. R. C. Schmidt
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Correspondence to R. C. Schmidt.

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Schmidt, R.C., Morr, S., Fitzpatrick, P. et al. Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 263–279 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-012-0138-5

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