Interpersonal Similarity between Body Movements in Face-To-Face Communication in Daily Life

Abstract

Individuals are embedded in social networks in which they communicate with others in their daily lives. Because smooth face-to-face communication is the key to maintaining these networks, measuring the smoothness of such communication is an important issue. One indicator of smoothness is the similarity of the body movements of the two individuals concerned. A typical example noted in experimental environments is the interpersonal synchronization of body movements such as nods and gestures during smooth face-to-face communication. It should therefore be possible to estimate quantitatively the smoothness of face-to-face communication in social networks through measurement of the synchronization of body movements. However, this is difficult because social networks, which differ from disciplined experimental environments, are open environments for the face-to-face communication between two individuals. In such open environments, their body movements become complicated by various external factors and may follow unstable and nonuniform patterns. Nevertheless, we consider there to be some interaction during face-to-face communication that leads to the interpersonal synchronization of body movements, which can be seen through the interpersonal similarity of body movements. The present study aims to clarify such interaction in terms of body movements during daily face-to-face communication in real organizations of more than 100 people. We analyzed data on the frequency of body movement for each individual during face-to-face communication, as measured by a wearable sensor, and evaluated the degree of interpersonal similarity of body movements between two individuals as their frequency difference. Furthermore, we generated uncorrelated data by resampling the data gathered and compared these two data sets statistically to distinguish the effects of actual face-to-face communication from those of the activities accompanying the communication. Our results confirm an interpersonal similarity of body movements between two individuals in face-to-face communication, for all the organizations studied, and suggest that some body interaction is behind this similarity.

Interpersonal Coevolution of Body Movements in Daily Face-to-Face Communication

“…That is, in a face-to-face situation, people synchronously increase or decrease their upper-body movements. Our previous study found that if people are in a faceto-face situation, their number of body movements tends to be similar [11]. Our result suggests that we do not achieve similarity of upper-body movements by closing the gap of the amount of body movements between people.…”

“…The time series of body movements on a second scale is usually much less stable or uniform in the real world than in a laboratory setting [11]. That is, in daily situation, it would be difficult to evaluate the quality of people's communication and to support the communication from the viewpoint of second-scale coevolution like many previous studies [13]- [16], [22]- [29], [37]- [39].…”

“…In daily face-to-face communication, people's behavior adjusts to the behavior of their communication partners [1]- [11]. This holds for short conversations measured in min-utes and long meetings or classroom conversations measured in hours.…”

“…We investigated the interpersonal coevolution of people's body movements on a second-time scale for daily situations. We observed the body movements and face-to-face contact of the test subjects [10], [11] using wearable devices [12]. We gathered data from over one thousand test subjects in real organizations over the course of one to two months.…”

“…We focused on upper-body movements of people because this is also the focus in the field of daily human behavior on different time scales [10], [11], [41], [42]. We calculated the amount of upper-body movements by the same procedure as in the previous study [12].…”