Interpersonal Coevolution of Body Movements in Daily Face-to-Face Communication

Abstract

SUMMARYPeople's body movements in daily face-to-face communication influence each other. For instance, during a heated debate, the participants use more gestures and other body movements, while in a calm discussion they use fewer gestures. This "coevolution" of interpersonal body movements occurs on multiple time scales, like minutes or hours. However, the multi-time-scale coevolution in daily communication is not clear yet.In this paper, we explore the minute-to-minute coevolution of interpersonal body movements in daily communication and investigate the characteristics of this coevolution. We present quantitative data on upper-body movements from thousand test subjects from seven organizations gathered over several months via wearable sensors. The device we employed measured upperbody movements with an accelerometer and the duration of face-to-face communication with an infrared ray sensor on a minute-by-minute basis. We defined a coevolution measure between two people as the number of per-minute changes of their body movement and compared the indices for face-to-face and non-face-to-face situations. We found that on average, the amount of people's body movements changed correspondingly for face-toface communication and that the average rate of coevolution in the case of face-to-face communication was 3-4% higher than in the case of nonface-to-face situation. These results reveal minute-to-minute coevolution of upper-body movements between people in daily communication. The finding suggests that the coevolution of body movement arises in multiple time scales.

Individual and Joint Body Movement Assessed by Wearable Sensing as a Predictor of Attraction in Speed Dates

“…Convergence has also been observed in the amount of laughter in a conversation [68] and the use of iconic gestures [69]. Ogata [70] coined the term coevolution to refer to joint changes in body movement, and found it to be more prevalent in face-to-face than in non-face-to-face interaction. A similar study used the term "synchrony" [71].…”