Unobtrusive tracking of interpersonal orienting and distance predicts the subjective quality of social interactions.

Juha M Lahnakoski,Paul A G Forbes,Cade Mccall,Leonhard Schilbach

doi:10.1098/rsos.191815

Abstract

Interpersonal coordination of behaviour is essential for smooth social interactions. Measures of interpersonal behaviour, however, often rely on subjective evaluations, invasive measurement techniques or gross measures of motion. Here, we constructed an unobtrusive motion tracking system that enables detailed analysis of behaviour at the individual and interpersonal levels, which we validated using wearable sensors. We evaluate dyadic measures of joint orienting and distancing, synchrony and gaze behaviours to summarize data collected during natural conversation and joint action tasks. Our results demonstrate that patterns of proxemic behaviours, rather than more widely used measures of interpersonal synchrony, best predicted the subjective quality of the interactions. Increased distance between participants predicted lower enjoyment, while increased joint orienting towards each other during cooperation correlated with increased effort reported by the participants. Importantly, the interpersonal distance was most informative of the quality of interaction when task demands and experimental control were minimal. These results suggest that interpersonal measures of behaviour gathered during minimally constrained social interactions are particularly sensitive for the subjective quality of social interactions and may be useful for interaction-based phenotyping for further studies.

Highlights

Non-verbal behaviour is an essential aspect of social interactions, conveying the mental states of interactants and affecting the quality of social relations
Our results further suggest that dyadic measures of social orienting and distancing behaviour may be more predictive of subjective evaluations of social interactions than the more widely employed synchrony measures in some situations
Our results show that proxemic behaviour including interpersonal distancing and facial and bodily orienting during natural interactions differs between types of interactions and reflects subsequent subjective evaluations of the interaction

Summary

Introduction

Non-verbal behaviour is an essential aspect of social interactions, conveying the mental states of interactants and affecting the quality of social relations. Abnormalities of non-verbal behaviour have been reported in a range of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia [7,8], social anxiety disorder [9] and autism [10,11,12,13], which may explain some of the social difficulties faced by persons affected by these conditions. Dynamic coupling of individuals may arise without direct synchrony of behaviour [17] and strict synchrony of movements may even be detrimental to the attainment of shared goals [18]. This suggests that additional mechanisms may be relevant, especially in naturalistic situations during which interaction partners may take different roles and mutually coordinate their behaviour in complementary ways

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