Conversational involvement and synchronous nonverbal behaviour

Abstract

Measuring the quality of an interaction by means of low-level cues has been the topic of many studies in the last couple of years. In this study we propose a novel method for conversation-quality-assessment. We first test whether manual ratings of conversational involvement and automatic estimation of synchronisation of facial activity are correlated. We hypothesise that the higher the synchrony the higher the involvement. We compare two different synchronisation measures. The first measure is defined as the similarity of facial activity at a given point in time. The second is based on dependence analyses between the facial activity time series of two interlocutors. We found that dependence measure correlates more with conversational involvement than similarity measure. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.