Effect of Dyadic Context on Judgments of Rapport: Dyad Task and Partner Presence

The present studies investigated the effects of dyadic context on judgments of nonverbal behavior associated with rapport. As predicted, the task performed by a dyad, the visible presence or absence of both dyad members, and the sex of the observer affected observer judgments of responsiveness, friendliness, dominance, critical scrutiny, polite sympathy, and high status. The results suggest that dyadic context affects judgments of dyad members' facilitation of rapport by both constraining dyad behavior and affecting observer perception: (a) Dyad members received higher judgments on person-focused behaviors when engaged in a discussion as compared to a puzzle; (b) Visible presence of an interaction partner led observers to see a dyad member, on the whole, as inhibiting rapport in the interaction; and (c) Female observers perceived dyad members to exhibit more rapport-facilitating behavior. These results have major implications for the way rapport and person perception research is conducted and for understanding interpersonal perception in everyday life.     

The judgment of rapport: A cross-cultural comparison between Americans and Greeks

Interpersonal perception was examined cross-culturally by having samples of Greek and American subjects view and judge the level of rapport throughout the same series of 50 dyadic interactions recorded in America. The overall pattern of results showed that: (a) the judgment policies and accuracy of the Greek and American samples were remarkably similar; (b) both groups fell far short of the agreement level possible for this task; and (c) the low levels of achievement were a consequence of both groups giving insufficient weight to valid behavioral predictors of rapport while relying on the apparently compelling but invalid cues, smiling and expressivity. Both the Greeks and Americans, it appears, have widely shared implicit theories or policies regarding which observable (i.e., nonverbal) aspects of an interaction indicate its positivity; these implicit policies are remarkably similar and they are imperfect.This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Young Investigator grant to the first author.     

Coordinated movement and rapport in teacher-student interactions

High school students in 19 teaching dyads were measured for their degree of interpersonal coordination and rapport. Two types of movement coordination were identified and rated by a group of untrained judges: the degree of perceivedmovement synchrony, and the extent ofbehavior matching. Ratings of movement synchrony in true interactions were significantly greater than similar ratings in pseudo interaction control clips (i.e., video clips that appeared to be of the teacher and student interacting but were, in fact, a combination of video clips of each interactant recorded fromdifferent points within their interaction). Self-ratings collected from interactants indicated a strong relationship between participants' rapport and the degree of movement synchrony perceived by raters. This relationship remained even after observer ratings of each interactant's friendliness, a possible confound, were partialled out. This result provided empirical evidence for the hypothesized relationship between rapport and interpersonal coordination (Tickle-Degnen & Rosenthal, 1987). Ratings of behavior matching did not differ significantly between the true interactions and pseudo interaction control clips. Behavior matching failed to correlate significantly with dyadic rapport. It was, however, significantly predictive of self-reported anxiety.This research was supported by NIH Biomedical Research Support Grant RR07079 to the author and by a National Science Foundation Grant to Robert Rosenthal.Thanks go to Wendy Chen and Jim Tobin who assisted in the data collection, to Robert Rosenthal, Kevin Lanning, Martha Davis, and an anonymous reviewer who provided insightful comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Washingtonville High School in Washingtonville, NY.Portions of this paper appear in a doctoral dissertation presented to the faculty of Harvard University.     

Revisiting Perceiver and Target Gender Effects in Deception Detection

Existing research is inconclusive regarding the influence of perceiver gender and target gender on lie detection. Researchers have offered a number of conclusions regarding gender effects in deception detection (e.g., women are better at lie detection than men, participant and target gender interact in predicting deception detection accuracy, there are no gender effects in deception detection). In the current work, we revisit the question of whether and how gender influences lie detection, employing a large database of controlled stimuli, a large sample size, and the analytical advantages provided by signal detection theory. Participants viewed videos of male and female targets telling truths and lies about interpersonal relationships, and after each video, they rendered a truth or lie judgment. Female targets were easier to “read” (i.e., greater sensitivity) and were called liars more frequently than male targets. No effects of participant gender were observed. This work sheds light on an important issue in the lie detection literature (i.e., does gender matter?), and it identifies important considerations for understanding gender biases and cross-gender social interactions.     

Auditory Stream Segregation Improves Infants' Selective Attention to Target Tones Amid Distractors

The present study examined the role of auditory stream segregation in the selective attention to target tones in infancy. Using a task adapted from Bregman and Rudnicky's (1975) study and implemented in a conditioned head-turn procedure, infant and adult listeners had to discriminate the temporal order of 2200 and 2400 Hz target tones presented alone, preceded and followed by 1460 Hz flanker tones, and presented within a series of 1460 Hz captor tones meant to release the target tones from the effects of the flankers by capturing the flankers into a separate stream. Infants showed the same pattern of discrimination across conditions as adults: discrimination of target tones in the target-alone condition, a decrease in performance when flanker tones were introduced, and a return to target-alone level in the captor condition. These results suggest that infants' perceptual organization of tones is similar to that of adults, and that their ability to selectively attend to target sounds and ignore distractors depends on the structural properties and perceptual organization of the non-target sounds.     

Detecting Happiness: Perceiver Sensitivity to Enjoyment and Non-Enjoyment Smiles

The physiognomic distinctions between spontaneous enjoyment smiles and deliberate non-enjoyment smiles provide the social perceiver with a functional, accessible source of information to help regulate social interaction. Two experiments were performed to investigate whether perceivers were sensitive to this information in a contextually meaningful manner. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether a target individual was happy or not. The results revealed that participants were indeed sensitive to the differences between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. In Experiment 2, participants performed a priming task without any specific instruction to judge emotional state. Neutral expressions, non-enjoyment smiles and enjoyment smiles were employed as primes in a word valence identification task. The results demonstrated a clear trend indicative of perceiver sensitivity. When compared to a the baseline condition of a neutral expression prime, enjoyment but not non-enjoyment smiles facilitated identification of positive words.

Social Workers' Postgraduate Use of the IFD Interpersonal Communication Model

Interpersonal communication assessment models have become very popular as a means of quickly establishing rapport in many settings across the United States. Despite their popularity and possible utility, there has been minimal research into the impact of these models, especially over time and in educational settings (more than 6 months after the training is over). In the master's of social work (MSW) program at Brigham Young University (BYU), the interpersonal family dynamics (IFD) model is used as a tool to better understand human behavior and strengthen relationships in the social work practice environment. This training is provided to first-year students in the foundation human behavior in the social environment course and to field supervisors in their field training conferences. BYU's MSW program graduates were surveyed to find out their perceptions of the utility of IFD. With a relatively high level of accuracy, the graduates reported IFD was a useful approach to better understanding human behavior in their daily practice. Graduates used the model as much in their personal lives as in their professional lives.     

Facial expressions of emotion influence interpersonal trait inferences

Theorists have argued that facial expressions of emotion serve the interpersonal function of allowing one animal to predict another's behavior. Humans may extend these predictions into the indefinite future, as in the case of trait inference. The hypothesis that facial expressions of emotion (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) affect subjects' interpersonal trait inferences (e.g., dominance and affiliation) was tested in two experiments. Subjects rated the dispositional affiliation and dominance of target faces with either static or apparently moving expressions. They inferred high dominance and affiliation from happy expressions, high dominance and low affiliation from angry and disgusted expressions, and low dominance from fearful and sad expressions. The findings suggest that facial expressions of emotion convey not only a target's internal state, but also differentially convey interpersonal information, which could potentially seed trait inference.This article constitutes a portion of my dissertation research at Stanford University, which was supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship and an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award. Thanks to Nancy Alvarado, Chris Dryer, Paul Ekman, Bertram Malle, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Steven Sutton, Robert Zajonc, and more anonymous reviewers than I can count on one hand for their comments.     

Patterns of Nonverbal Behavior and Sensivity in the Context of Attachment Relations

Nonverbal behavior and sensitivity to a relationship partner’s nonverbal behavior importantly influence the quality of interpersonal interactions and relationships, including attachment relationships. The abilities to encode, or express, and to decode, or understand, nonverbal cues are crucial to effective communication of emotions and are associated with social adjustment and relationship satisfaction. One important social context for the development and use of nonverbal encodingand decoding abilities is what Bowlby (1969/1982, Attachment and loss: Vol.1.Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books) called attachment relationships—interpersonal relationships in which one person’s emotional security depends on another person’s sensitive, responsive caregiving and support. In this paper, we present theoretical ideas, review relevant research, and propose new avenues of research dealing with associations between attachment-related processes and patterns of nonverbal behavior and sensitivity in adulthood, two domains of research that have not previously been adequately connected.     

Actor's Status and Conformity to Norms: A Study of Students' Evaluations of Instructors*

The relationship between behavior and interpersonal evaluation is examined from the perspective of role theory. We hypothesize that others' evaluation of a role actor–his or her status–is related to the actor's conformity to their norms. Students in 50 university classes were asked (a) to indicate their expectations for a “typical university instructor” by filling out a 55-item questionnaire which incorporates Jackson's Return Potential Model for measuring normative role phenomena, or (b) to judge the frequency of the class instructor's behavior on the same 55 items. An index was constructed which indicates the degree to which each instructor's behaviors conform to students' expectations for a typical instructor. This index correlated with students' mean evaluation of each instructor: his or her status (r=.64, p<.001). We demonstrate, however, that this relationship between conformity and status holds more strongly for intense, powerful norms, and only for instructors with a moderate rather than a relatively high reputation, that is, estimated status.     

Meta-Analyses of the Intra- and Interpersonal Outcomes of Interpersonal Coordination

Interpersonal coordination, the extent to which social partners coordinate each other’s postures and mannerisms, acts as a “social glue” that serves both individual and social goals, such as producing prosocial behaviors and facilitating harmonious interactions. Research in this area has become prominent in a variety of domains both within and outside of psychology, forming a sizeable literature dedicated to investigating the causes and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We conducted a series of meta-analyses on studies that treated interpersonal coordination as an independent variable, in order to measure its effect on several intrapersonal (e.g., mood, need to belong) and interpersonal (e.g., prosocial behavior) outcomes, as well as several potential moderators (e.g., percentage of female participants) that may affect the strength of the effect. Overall, the results demonstrated that the positive effects of interpersonal coordination are robust, with a few exceptions specific to intrapersonal outcomes. These findings provide a much-needed quantitative summary of the literature on interpersonal coordination, and highlight areas that merit future research.     

Rapport expressed through nonverbal behavior

Family Medicine residents were videotaped in interviews with a new and a return-visit patient. Two coders recorded nonverbal behavior performed by the residents for two, one-minute segments of each interview. Categories of movement included: proxemic behaviors of distance, orientation, and trunk lean, and head, hand/arm, and leg/foot movement, facial expression, and direction of gaze.Each of the 36 video segments were rated by a group of psychiatric nurses using bipolar adjective scales assessing dimensions of rapport. Significant differences in nonverbal behavior were found between high and low rapport doctors. Physicians were rated more positively when they sat directly facing the patient, with uncrossed legs, and arms in symmetrical, side-by-side positions. High rapport doctors also engaged in moderate, but less extensive eye contact, with the patient than low rapport doctors. Discussion focuses on the impact of nonverbal behavior on physician-patient communication and the establishment of rapport.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.     

A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Studying the Role of Overconfidence in Problem Gambling

Research on the neural correlates of decision making in gambling tasks may be informative for understanding problem gambling. The present study explored confidence and overconfidence using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure brain activity during a judgment task. Nineteen undergraduates who self-identified as frequent gamblers (average age 19.7 years; 5 females, 14 males) participated in this study. Participants first completed the DIGS (Winters, Specker & Stinchfield, 2002), a measure of gambling pathology. They then engaged in a behavioral task of confidence assessment, wherein they answered two-alternative trivia questions and estimated the probability that each answer was correct. In a subsequent MEG task, they viewed the questions and a target answer, and indicated with a button press whether the target matched the correct answer. Confidence was directly related to activity in the right prefrontal cortex. Matching and mismatching targets were associated with activity in the medial occipital cortex and left supramarginal gyrus, respectively. An interaction of pathology and match/mismatch was observed in the right inferior occipital-temporal junction region, showing more activity following a mismatch in non-problem gamblers, but not in problem gamblers. Implications of the results for understanding of top–down modulation and attentional systems are discussed in relation to gambling behavior.     

The developmental priority of the evaluative dimension in perceptions of nonverbal cues

Researchers who have attempted to map the basic structure of broad psychological domains (such as interpersonal behavior) have invariably pointed to the importance of the evaluative dimension. It was predicted that sensitivity to such a salient dimension would develop prior to sensitivity to other important but apparently weaker dimensions, such as dominance-submissiveness. The predicted developmental trend was supported in a study of nonverbal decoding. When judging pairs of emotional cues communicated by the face or body and by the tone of voice, younger subjects, compared to older ones, were more likely to notice discrepancies in the degree of expressed positivity than in the degree of expressed dominance.     

Domain specificity of fairness judgments in economic transactions

Two studies eliciting fairness judgments about hypothetical economic transactions examined whether fairness judgments were influenced by who was being judged. The first study replicated the results of Kahneman et al. (Am. Econom. Rev. 76 (1986a) 728–741; J. Business 59 (1986b) S285–S300) that people judge certain actions by firms as unfair, but it also demonstrated that people judge parallel actions by individuals as fair. The second study suggested that people apply different standards to individuals and firms because of presumed differences between them in wealth, power, and size. When firms were portrayed as no more powerful or wealthy than individuals, differences in fairness judgments were eliminated. Further, respondents were less inclined to judge the behavior of a firm harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the firm was identified with an individual than when it was large and anonymous, and they were more inclined to judge the behavior of an individual harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the action injured a firm with a clearly identified individual than when the firm was large and anonymous.     

Infants use contextual memory to attend and learn in naturalistic scenes

Infants encounter new objects and learn about object features in relation to a rich and detailed visuospatial context. Using a contextual cueing task, recent work showed that 6- and 10-month-old infants search more efficiently for target objects in repeated rather than novel visuospatial contexts (i.e., arrays of shapes on a blank background). Here, we investigate whether infants' sensitivity to visuospatial context scales up to more complex and potentially more distracting, naturalistic scenes. In an eye-tracking task, 8-month-olds searched for a novel target object in colorful photographs of everyday environments (e.g., bedrooms and kitchens). Repeated (“Old”) contexts co-varied with target locations, such that the target object appeared in exactly the same location on the same scene, while varying (“New”) contexts contained target objects placed in different counterbalanced locations across a variety of scenes. Infants exhibited faster search times, more anticipation of target animation, and longer looking at targets that appeared in Old relative to New contexts. In a subsequent memory test, infants showed better recognition of label-object pairings for target objects that had appeared in Old, rather than New, contexts. These results indicate that infants can use visuospatial contextual information in complex naturalistic scenes to facilitate memory-guided attention and learning of object-paired labels.     

Age Similarities in Interpersonal Perception and Conversation Ability

Older adults tend to perform worse on emotion perception tasks compared to younger adults. How this age difference relates to other interpersonal perception tasks and conversation ability remains an open question. In the present study, we assessed 32 younger and 30 older adults’ accuracy when perceiving (1) static facial expressions, (2) emotions, attitudes, and intentions from videos, (3) and interpersonal constructs (e.g., kinship). Participants’ conversation ability was rated by coders from a videotaped, dyadic problem-solving task. Younger adults were more accurate than older adults perceiving some but not all emotions. No age differences in accuracy were found on any perception task or in conversation ability. Some but not all of the interpersonal perception tasks were related. None of the perception tasks predicted conversation ability. Thus, although the literature suggests a robust age difference in emotion perception accuracy, this difference does not seem to transfer to other interpersonal perception tasks or interpersonal outcomes.     

Emotional Facial Expression Recognition and Expressivity in Type I and Type II Alcohol Dependent Patients

Alcohol dependent patients (ADs) are known to encounter severe interpersonal problems. Nonverbal communication skills are important for the development of healthy relationships. The present study aimed to explore emotional facial expression (EFE) recognition and posed and spontaneous EFE expressivity in male ADs divided into two groups according to Cloninger’s typology and the impact of their interpersonal relationship quality on the potential nonverbal deficits. Twenty type I ADs, twenty-one type II ADs, and twenty control participants took part in an EFE recognition task and an EFE expressivity task that considered personal emotional events (spontaneous expressivity) and EFE in response to a photo or word cue (posed expressivity). Coding was based on judges’ ratings of participants’ emotional facial expressions. Participants additionally completed a questionnaire on interpersonal relationship quality. No difference between the three groups emerged in the EFE recognition task. Type II ADs showed heightened deficits compared with type I ADs in EFE expressivity: Judges perceived less accurate posed EFE in response to a cue word and less intense and positive spontaneous EFE in type II ADs compared to control participants. In addition, type II ADs reported more relationship difficulties compared to both type I ADs and control participants. These interpersonal relationship difficulties were related to some of the EFE expressivity deficits of AD-IIs. This study underlines the important differences between the interpersonal functioning of AD subtypes.     

Nonverbal Synchrony and Complementarity in Unacquainted Same-Sex Dyads: A Comparison in a Competitive Context

Research on interpersonal synchronization deals with the coordination of behavior, cognition and affect within interacting individuals. The phenomenon of synchronization has been explored in many settings and numerous definitions have emerged. The purpose of this study was to compare nonverbal synchrony (based on overall body movement) with the concept of complementarity (based on interpersonal theory) in a competitive context. We examined 40 previously unacquainted same-sex dyads (21 female, 19 male; mean age = 22.81). Dyads underwent a 15-min videotaped competitive role-play. Nonverbal synchrony was quantified by a frame-differencing method, and complementarity by a joystick tracking method. Results revealed that dyads behaved in a synchronous and complementary manner. We found that nonverbal synchrony was positively correlated with affiliation complementarity, but not dominance complementarity. The present study compared nonverbal synchrony with complementarity. The link between the two concepts was small, as indicated by rather weak correlations between nonverbal synchrony and affiliation complementarity. Our results reinforce the view that competitive behavior depends on complex dyadic interactions, including nonverbal and verbal behavior.