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Abstract
Interpersonal physiological synchrony has been successfully used to characterize social interactions and social processes during a variety of interpersonal interactions. There are a handful of measures of interpersonal physiological synchrony, but those that exist have only been validated on able-bodied adults. Here, we present a novel information-theory based measure of interpersonal physiological synchrony—normalized Symbolic Transfer Entropy (NSTE)—and compare its performance with a popular physiological synchrony measure—physiological concordance and single session index (SSI). Using wearable sensors, we measured the electrodermal activity (EDA) of five individuals with dementia and six able-bodied individuals as they participated in a movement activity that aimed to foster connection in persons with dementia. We calculated time-resolved NSTE and SSI measures for case studies of three dyads and compared them against moments of observed interpersonal connection in video recordings of the activity. Our findings suggest that NSTE-based measures of interpersonal physiological synchrony may provide additional advantages over SSI, including resolving moments of ambiguous SSI and providing information about the direction of information flow between participants. This study also investigated the feasibility of using interpersonal synchrony to gain insight into moments of connection experienced by individuals with dementia and further encourages exploration of these measures in other populations with reduced communicative abilities.
Highlights
Interpersonal physiological synchrony is a measure that has been used to investigate the relationship between individual’s physiological dynamics and the interpersonal contexts and interactions in which they manifest
The current study presents a novel measure of interpersonal physiological synchrony—normalized symbolic transfer entropy (NSTE)—and demonstrates its potential for detecting moments of interpersonal connection via electrodermal activity
We demonstrate that normalized symbolic transfer entropy calculated across the electrodermal activity (EDA) of two individuals is related to significant moments of interpersonal connection within the dyad and can indicate the direction of information flow during these moments
Summary
Interpersonal physiological synchrony is a measure that has been used to investigate the relationship between individual’s physiological dynamics and the interpersonal contexts and interactions in which they manifest. The second approach uses time-lagged techniques, such as coupled differential equation models, lagged cross-correlations, and Granger causality models, to study the predictive relationship between a dyad’s physiological signals (Schreiber, 2000; Müller and Lindenberger, 2011; Ferrer and Helm, 2013; Marzbanrad et al, 2015; Helm et al, 2018). Few studies have examined directed, or causal influence of electrodermal activity signals in dyadic interactions (Helm et al, 2018) This approach has the potential to reveal more information about the dyadic interaction, including direction of influence, strength of influence, and time lags. Information-theoretic approaches include transfer entropy, a non-linear extension of GC that addresses many of its limitations (Lee et al, 2015)
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