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Exploring skin conductance synchronisation in everyday interactions

Published: 26 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Detecting interpersonal and emotional aspects of behaviour is a growing area of research within HCI. However, this work primarily processes data from individuals, rather than drawing on the dynamics of an interaction between people. Literature in social psychology and neuroscience suggests that the synchronisation of peoples' biosignals, in particular skin conductance (EDA), can be indicative of complex interpersonal aspects such as empathy. This paper reports on an exploratory, mixed methods study to test the potential of EDA synchronisation to indicate qualities of interpersonal interaction in real-world relationships and contexts. We show that EDA synchrony can be indicate meaningful social aspects in everyday settings, linking it to the mutual emotional engagement of those interacting. This connects to earlier work on empathy in psychotherapy, and suggests new interpretations of EDA sychronisation in other social contexts. We then outline how these findings open opportunities for novel HCI and ubicomp applications, supporting training of social skills such as empathy for doctors, and more generally to explore shared experiences such as multiplayer games.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '14: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational
    October 2014
    361 pages
    ISBN:9781450325424
    DOI:10.1145/2639189
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 26 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. GSR
    2. biosensors
    3. empathy
    4. mixed methods
    5. physiological synchrony
    6. skin conductance

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    NordiCHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 89 of 361 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Situating Empathy in HCI/CSCW: A Scoping ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870528:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Exploring the role of emotions and conversation content in interpersonal synchrony: A case study of a couple therapy sessionPsychotherapy Research10.1080/10503307.2024.236143235:2(190-206)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2024
    • (2023)Video-based Respiratory Waveform Estimation in Dialogue: A Novel Task and Dataset for Human-Machine InteractionProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3577190.3614154(649-660)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
    • (2023)BreatheWithMe: Exploring Visual and Vibrotactile Displays for Social Breath Awareness during Colocated, Collaborative TasksExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585589(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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    • (2023)Physiological Synchrony in a Collaborative Virtual Reality Task2023 15th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)10.1109/QoMEX58391.2023.10178661(288-293)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Synchronized affect in shared experiences strengthens social connectionCommunications Biology10.1038/s42003-023-05461-26:1Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
    • (2022)A Person-Centered Approach to Study Students’ Socio-Emotional Interaction Profiles and Regulation of Collaborative LearningFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2022.8666127Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
    • (2021)Interpersonal Physiological Synchrony for Detecting Moments of Connection in Persons With Dementia: A Pilot StudyFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2021.74971012Online publication date: 13-Dec-2021
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