Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines

Abstract

Abstract-Synchrony refers to individuals' temporal coordination during social interactions. The analysis of this phenomenon is complex, requiring the perception and integration of multimodal communicative signals. The evaluation of synchrony has received multidisciplinary attention because of its role in early development, language learning and social connection. Originally studied by developmental psychologists, synchrony has now captured the interest of researchers in such fields as social signal processing, robotics and machine learning. This paper emphasizes the current questions asked by synchrony evaluation and the state-of-the-art related methods. First, we present definitions and functions of synchrony in youth and adulthood. Next, we review the non-computational and computational approaches of annotating, evaluating and modeling interactional synchrony. Finally, the current limitations and future research directions in the fields of developmental robotics, social robotics and clinical studies are discussed.

Perceptions and expectations of regular support meetings between staff and people with an intellectual disability

“…They found the support staff they studied made efforts to synchronise their interactions with people with an ID. The ability of staff to synchronise with people with an ID not only helped to build rapport but also was closely linked with greater cooperation between the communicative partners (Delaherche et al, 2012). These findings suggest that staff may have the skills to help empower people with an ID as partners in an interaction.…”

“…At the process level, staff and people with an ID should be able to accurately predict the beginnings and endings of each other's communicative turns. Accurately predicting the ending of the other speaker's turn allows the individual to gauge the correct time to begin his or her turn, allowing the conversational partners to achieve synchrony (Delaherche et al, 2012). Attunement of turn-taking patterns was measured using cross-recurrence quantification analysis.…”

Predicting Extraversion from Non-verbal Features During a Face-to-Face Human-Robot Interaction

“…Further, proxemics rules hold true also when one of the interactants is not a human, therefore a low familiarity or confidence with robots (that is, a negative attitude toward robots) results in increasing the interpersonal distance [18]. Interpersonal synchrony is acknowledged as very relevant in early communication between humans [5], and it provides information about the quality of interaction traits of the peers. For example, as referred in [7] "people tend to synchronise their rhythms and movements ... within a conversation".…”

Predicting online lecture ratings based on gesturing and vocal behavior

“…In particular, domains like Affective Computing [31] and Social Signal Processing [43] adopted nonverbal behavioral cues as a physical, machine detectable evidence of emotional and social phenomena, respectively. Research efforts targeted a wide spectrum of problems, including conflict detection [28], communication dynamics [7,25], mimicry measurement [10], early detection of developmental and cognitive diseases [37], role recognition [38], prediction of negotiation outcomes [9], videosurveillance [4,5,6,8], etc. Furthermore, several works were dedicated to the automatic prediction of traits likely to be relevant in a teaching context like, in particular, personality [21,23,30] and dominance [13,27,34,35].…”