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Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony pp 182–196Cite as

Nonverbal Synchrony or Random Coincidence? How to Tell the Difference

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5967))

Abstract

Nonverbal synchrony in face-to-face interaction has been studied in numerous empirical investigations focusing on various communication channels. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of synchrony in physics, chemistry and biology adds to its face-validity. This paper is focused on establishing criteria for a statistical evaluation of synchrony in human interaction. When assessing synchrony in any communication context, it is necessary to distinguish genuine synchrony from pseudosynchrony, which may arise due to random coincidence. By using a bootstrap approach, we demonstrate a way to quantify the amount of synchrony that goes beyond random coincidence, thus establishing an objective measure for the phenomenon. Applying this technique to psychotherapy data, we develop a hypothesis-driven empirical evaluation of nonverbal synchrony. The method of surrogate testing in order to control for chance is suitable to any corpus of empirical data and lends itself to better empirically informed inference.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry, Laupenstrasse 49, 3010, Bern, Switzerland

    Fabian Ramseyer & Wolfgang Tschacher

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  1. Fabian Ramseyer
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  2. Wolfgang Tschacher
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Second University of Naples, and IIASS, Via Pellegrino, 84019, Vietri sul Mare, SA, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  2. Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College, The University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Nick Campbell  & Carl Vogel  & 

  3. Department of Computing Science & Mathematics, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA, Stirling, Scotland, UK

    Amir Hussain

  4. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anton Nijholt

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Ramseyer, F., Tschacher, W. (2010). Nonverbal Synchrony or Random Coincidence? How to Tell the Difference. In: Esposito, A., Campbell, N., Vogel, C., Hussain, A., Nijholt, A. (eds) Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5967. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12397-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12397-9_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12396-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12397-9

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