Gender differences in synchrony: Females in sync during unstructured dyadic conversation

Abstract

Although previous studies have reported that individual prosocial traits generally enhance synchrony, gender as a social factor was not the subject of focus. The present study examined gender differences in synchrony by conducting three experiments on dyadic unstructured conversations with same‐gender strangers. Synchrony was assessed by calculating the cross‐wavelet coherence and determining the relative phase. As expected, through the three experiments, the female dyads showed a higher degree of synchrony, compared to the male dyads. Moreover, the conversation type (i.e., structured monologue vs. unstructured dialogue) did not moderate the gender effect (Experiment 2), while synchrony in the female dyads was influenced by the preceding conversation (Experiment 3). In contrast, through the three experiments, the role of the relative phase was unclear. The findings indicate that the social factor, gender, has an impact on synchrony, and that interpersonal sensitivity contributes to synchrony.

Change Process in Coaching: Interplay of Nonverbal Synchrony, Working Alliance, Self-Regulation, and Goal Attainment

“…Where coaches conducted 60-min sessions, they delivered 10 video-taped files while others provided fewer video-recorded sessions where their engagement was to end sooner according to the coaching contract. For the purposes of automated video-analysis in coaching as a non-clinical helping intervention, it was assumed that the clients, who were not subject to inclusion or exclusion criteria based on diagnosis (e.g., psychosis, substance dependency), would have a normal capacity to synchronize nonverbally as observed in student dyads (Lozza et al, 2018 ; Fujiwara et al, 2019 ; Dunbar et al, 2020 ).…”

Comparing Manual and Automated Coding Methods of Nonverbal Synchrony

“…Instead, the WTC in a specific frequency band (i.e., .5-1.5 Hz, see also Supplementary material) yielded a significant difference. A previous study conducted in Japan (Fujiwara et al, 2019) demonstrated that synchrony calculated by the wavelet coherence was associated with mutual interest between speakers. In addition, synchrony in the rhythm of .5-1.5 Hz is found to be effective in building rapport (Fujiwara et al, 2020).…”

“…This technique does not capture the coordinate point of each joint part but calculates the change in gray-scale pixels between adjacent video frames in a region of interest (ROI), which can be encoded as a movement if the camcorder was fixed and neither background nor the lightning condition changed through the clip. Previous studies suggest that the reliability of this technique for capturing movement is high (e.g., Fujiwara et al, 2019Fujiwara et al, , 2020Schoenherr et al, 2019).…”

“…C-BAS was employed for the manual coding to count the occurrence of synchrony such as gestures, postural shifts, and nodding. For automated coding, this study features Motion Energy Analysis (Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011) because it has been widely used in previous studies (e.g., Fujiwara et al, 2019Fujiwara et al, , 2020Schoenherr et al, 2019) and is widely available to many researchers. The MEA software has excellent usability but does not require a written code for analysis, and the current version (4.11; June 30, 2020) is available for Mac and Windows users.…”

Exploring the “Dark Matter” of Social Interaction: Systematic Review of a Decade of Research in Spontaneous Interpersonal Coordination

“…A second set of studies observed the emergence of interpersonal coordination during structured or unstructured conversations using monologue or free conversations (Fujiwara and Daibo, 2016;Fujiwara et al, 2019), cooperative or competitive framing Dale, 2013, 2017;Tschacher et al, 2014Tschacher et al, , 2018Lozza et al, 2018), or pre-scripted and turn-taking settings (Schmidt et al, 2012;Hale et al, 2020).…”