Listeners as co-narrators

Synchrony as a measure of conversation difficulty: Movement coherence increases with background noise level and complexity in dyads and triads

When people interact, they fall into synchrony. This synchrony has been demonstrated in a range of contexts, from walking or playing music together to holding a conversation, and has been linked to prosocial outcomes such as development of rapport and efficiency of cooperation. While the basis of synchrony remains unclear, several studies have found synchrony to increase when an interaction is made challenging, potentially providing a means of facilitating interaction. Here we focus on head movement during free conversation. As verbal information is obscured when conversing over background noise, we investigate whether synchrony is greater in high vs low levels of noise, as well as addressing the effect of background noise complexity. Participants held a series of conversations with unfamiliar interlocutors while seated in a lab, and the background noise level changed every 15-30s between 54, 60, 66, 72, and 78 dB. We report measures of head movement synchrony recorded via high-resolution motion tracking at the extreme noise levels (i.e., 54 vs 78 dB) in dyads (n = 15) and triads (n = 11). In both the dyads and the triads, we report increased movement coherence in high compared to low level speech-shaped noise. Furthermore, in triads we compare behaviour in speech-shaped noise vs multi-talker babble, and find greater movement coherence in the more complex babble condition. Key synchrony differences fall in the 0.2-0.5 Hz frequency bands, and are discussed in terms of their correspondence to talkers' average utterance durations. Additional synchrony differences occur at higher frequencies in the triads only (i.e., >5 Hz), which may relate to synchrony of backchannel cues (as multiple individuals were listening and responding to the same talker). Not only do these studies replicate prior work indicating interlocutors' increased reliance on behavioural synchrony as task difficulty increases, but they demonstrate these effects using multiple difficulty manipulations and across different sized interaction groups.

Feeling Heard: Experiences of Listening (or Not) at Work

Listening has been identified as a key workplace skill, important for ensuring high-quality communication, building relationships, and motivating employees. However, recent research has increasingly suggested that speaker perceptions of good listening do not necessarily align with researcher or listener conceptions of good listening. While many of the benefits of workplace listening rely on employees feeling heard, little is known about what constitutes this subjective perception. To better understand what leaves employees feeling heard or unheard, we conducted 41 interviews with bank employees, who collectively provided 81 stories about listening interactions they had experienced at work. Whereas, prior research has typically characterized listening as something that is perceived through responsive behaviors within conversation, our findings suggest conversational behaviors alone are often insufficient to distinguish between stories of feeling heard vs. feeling unheard. Instead, our interviewees felt heard or unheard only when listeners met their subjective needs and expectations. Sometimes their needs and expectations could be fulfilled through conversation alone, and other times action was required. Notably, what would be categorized objectively as good listening during an initial conversation could be later counteracted by a failure to follow-through in ways expected by the speaker. In concert, these findings contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying how listening behaviors take on meaning from the speakers' perspective and the circumstances under which action is integral to feeling heard. Moreover, they point toward the various ways listeners can engage to help speakers feel heard in critical conversations.

Comparing Frequency of Listener Responses Between Adolescents with and Without ASD During Conversation

In conversation, the listener plays an active role in conversation success, specifically by providing listener feedback which signals comprehension and interest. Previous work has shown that frequency of feedback positively correlates with conversation success. Because individuals with ASD are known to struggle with various conversational skills, e.g., turn-taking and commenting, this study examines their use of listener feedback by comparing the frequency of feedback produced by 20 adolescents with ASD and 23 neurotypical (NT) adolescents. We coded verbal and nonverbal listener feedback during the time when participants were listening in a semi-structured interview with a research assistant. Results show that ASD participants produced significantly fewer instances of listener feedback than NT adolescents, which likely contributes to difficulties with social interactions.

Keep Calm and Carry On: The Relations Between Narrative Coherence, Trauma, Social Support, Psychological Well-Being, and Cortisol Responses

In order to explain trauma resilience, previous research has been investigating possible risk and protective factors, both on an individual and a contextual level. In this experimental study, we examined narrative coherence and social support in relation to trauma resilience. Participants were asked to write about a turning point memory, after which they did the Maastricht Acute Stress Test, our lab analog of a traumatic event. Following, half of the participants received social support, whereas the other half did not. Afterwards, all participants wrote a narrative on the traumatic event. Moment-to-moment fluctuations in psychological and physiological well-being throughout the experiment were investigated with state anxiety questionnaires and cortisol measures. Results showed that narratives of traumatic experiences were less coherent than narratives of turning point memories. However, contrary to our predictions, coherence, and, in particular, thematic coherence, related positively to anxiety levels. Possibly, particular types of thematic coherence are a non-adaptive form of coping, which reflect unfinished attempts at meaning-making and are more similar to continuous rumination than to arriving at a resolution. Furthermore, coherence at baseline could not buffer against the impact of trauma on anxiety levels in this study. Contrary to our hypotheses, social support did not have the intended beneficial effects on coherence, neither on well-being. Multiple explanations as to why our support manipulation remained ineffective are suggested. Remarkably, lower cortisol levels at baseline and after writing about the turning point memory predicted higher coherence in the trauma narratives. This may suggest that the ability to remain calm in difficult situations does relate to the ability to cope adaptively with future difficult experiences. Clinical and social implications of the present findings are discussed, and future research recommendations on the relations between narrative coherence, social support, and trauma resilience are addressed.

An Investigation of the Coherence of Oral Narratives: Associations With Mental Health, Social Support and the Coherence of Written Narratives

Research Questions

In a first research question, we examined whether the relations that are generally observed between the coherence of written autobiographical narratives and outcomes of mental health and social support, can be replicated for the coherence of oral narratives. Second, we studied whether the coherence of oral narratives is related to the coherence of written narratives.

Methods

Pearson correlations and t-tests were calculated on data of two separate studies to examine the research questions.

Results

First, only thematic coherence of oral narratives was significantly, although moderately, negatively associated to symptoms of depression, anxiety and negative social interactions. Second, the coherence of oral narratives was higher than the coherence of written narratives. Only the thematic coherence of oral narratives was positively associated with thematic and total coherence of written narratives. Furthermore, correlations between written and oral narratives were stronger for negative narratives as compared to positive narratives.

Discussion

The ability to elaborate emotionally and make meaning out of important life events in oral narratives is, to a certain extent, related to better mental health and more social support. Furthermore, thematic coherence may be a relatively stable feature of individuals' narrative styles that is reflected in narratives of different modalities. Nonetheless, these topics need to be further researched to overcome present limitations.

Forgotten Little Words: How Backchannels and Particles May Facilitate Speech Planning in Conversation?

In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e., by beginning to plan their utterance during the preceding turn. This raises the question of how speakers manage to co-ordinate speech planning and listening with each other. Experimental work addressing this issue has mostly concerned the capacity demands and interference arising when speakers retrieve some content words while listening to others. However, many contributions to conversations are not content words, but backchannels, such as “hm”. Backchannels do not provide much conceptual content and are therefore easy to plan and respond to. To estimate how much they might facilitate speech planning in conversation, we determined their frequency in a Dutch and a German corpus of conversational speech. We found that 19% of the contributions in the Dutch corpus, and 16% of contributions in the German corpus were backchannels. In addition, many turns began with fillers or particles, most often translation equivalents of “yes” or “no,” which are likewise easy to plan. We proposed that to generate comprehensive models of using language in conversation psycholinguists should study not only the generation and processing of content words, as is commonly done, but also consider backchannels, fillers, and particles.

Conversation in small groups: Speaking and listening strategies depend on the complexities of the environment and group

Many conversations in our day-to-day lives are held in noisy environments – impeding comprehension, and in groups – taxing auditory attention-switching processes. These situations are particularly challenging for older adults in cognitive and sensory decline. In noisy environments, a variety of extra-linguistic strategies are available to speakers and listeners to facilitate communication, but while models of language account for the impact of context on word choice, there has been little consideration of the impact of context on extra-linguistic behaviour. To address this issue, we investigate how the complexity of the acoustic environment and interaction situation impacts extra-linguistic conversation behaviour of older adults during face-to-face conversations. Specifically, we test whether the use of intelligibility-optimising strategies increases with complexity of the background noise (from quiet to loud, and in speech-shaped vs. babble noise), and with complexity of the conversing group (dyad vs. triad). While some communication strategies are enhanced in more complex background noise, with listeners orienting to talkers more optimally and moving closer to their partner in babble than speech-shaped noise, this is not the case with all strategies, as we find greater vocal level increases in the less complex speech-shaped noise condition. Other behaviours are enhanced in the more complex interaction situation, with listeners using more optimal head orientations, and taking longer turns when gaining the floor in triads compared to dyads. This study elucidates how different features of the conversation context impact individuals’ communication strategies, which is necessary to both develop a comprehensive cognitive model of multimodal conversation behaviour, and effectively support individuals that struggle conversing.

Be coherent and become heard: The multidimensional impact of narrative coherence on listeners' social responses

Previous research has suggested that sharing autobiographical memories in a coherent manner has a beneficial impact on consequent social reactions of listeners. In this experimental study, we were able to replicate earlier findings by demonstrating that listeners (N = 107) showed significantly more willingness to interact with, more social support towards, and a more positive attitude towards coherent than incoherent narrators. Remarkably, these beneficial effects of coherence were observed only for narratives about positive memories. Results are explained in the light of the relevance of positive memories for the social bonding function of autobiographical memory. Furthermore, earlier work was extended and refined by investigating effects of the individual constituting dimensions of coherence (context, chronology, theme) on social responses. In line with our predictions, the dimensions of chronology and theme were most important in impacting social responses of listeners. Possibly a reduction of the attraction effect due to increased effortful processing and reduced credibility due to insufficient emotional elaboration might explain these results respectively. Furthermore, social responses were worse when narratives were incoherent with regard to more than one dimension, in line with the expected additive effect. Overall, fully incoherent narratives, which had had low scores on context, chronology, and theme, had the most adverse effect on listeners’ social responses. This study adds significantly to the domain of memory and cognition by showing how cognitive psychological research would benefit from extending a merely intrapersonal perspective to include an interpersonal perspective that considers social implications of memory and cognition as well.

Empathetic listening boosts nostalgia levels and positive emotions in autobiographical narrators

Nostalgic memories serve to increase human resilience. Here, we hypothesized that emotional impressions on a narrator's nostalgic memory change depending on the level of empathy in the listener's response. This independent-measures study was conducted in 120 healthy Japanese undergraduates (66 women, 54 men, M _age 20.3 ± 1.9 years). Nostalgia was induced using a medley of Japanese pop songs from the years 2006-2010. Thirty minutes later each participant was randomly allocated to be interviewed by an experimenter who applied one of three listening conditions: empathy, non-empathy, or non-response. Output measures were participant's talking time, nostalgia ratings, and positive and negative emotion ratings. Data were analyzed by analysis of variance followed by a multiple comparisons test. Empathy group participants had a significantly longer talking time than non-empathy or non-response participants, higher nostalgia scores than non-response participants, and higher positive emotion scores than non-empathy and non-response participants, but lower negative emotion scores than non-reponse participants. Participants were then divided into a less nostalgia-prone and a more nostalgia-prone group using the Southampton Nostalgia Rating Scale and the data were reanalyzed for each experimental condition. The results showed that a person more prone to nostalgia felt more nostalgic and more positive toward their autobiographical memory than those who are less nostalgia-prone. The present findings have implications for human interaction in everyday life and in therapeutic settings.

I like you better when you are coherent. Narrating autobiographical memories in a coherent manner has a positive impact on listeners' social evaluations

INTRODUCTION

We all have stories to tell. The stories that prevail in our conversations frequently concern significant past personal experiences and are accordingly based on autobiographical memory retrieval and sharing. This is in line with the social function of autobiographical memory, which embodies the idea that we share memories with others to develop and maintain social relationships. However, the successful fulfilment of this social function is dependent on phenomenological properties of the memory, which are highly inter-individually different. One important individual difference is memory coherence, operationalized as narrative coherence. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of memory coherence on the social evaluations of listeners. We hypothesized that being incoherent in the sharing of autobiographical memories, would evoke more negative social evaluations from listeners, in comparison to coherently sharing autobiographical memories.

METHODS

In a within-subject experimental study, 96 participants listened to four pre-recorded audio clips in which the speaker narrated about an autobiographical experience, in either a coherent or an incoherent manner.

RESULTS

Results were in line with our hypotheses. Participants showed more willingness to interact, more instrumental support, more positive feelings, more empathy and more trust towards those narrators who talked in a coherent manner about their autobiographical memories, as compared to those that talked in an incoherent manner. Negative feelings in the listener were evoked when the speaker talked incoherently, but especially when it concerned a positive memory.

DISCUSSION

Results can be explained in terms of a reduction in the attraction effect when effortful processing is increased, which is in line with the dual processing theory of impression formation. Another explanation involves the idea that coherence is necessary to establish truthfulness in communication. The clinical relevance of these findings is further illustrated in light of the relation between social support and psychological well-being.

Question asking as a dyadic behavior

Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, and Gino (2017) studied the role of question asking in conversations. They claimed to have identified "a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking" (p. 1), where liking is affected largely by follow-up questions, rather than by switch questions. They concluded that their "data support a trait-level model of question-asking behavior" (p. 12), and that "question-asking is a critical component of active listening" (p. 14). Our theoretical, methodological, and empirical reanalyses of their speed-dating study (Study 3), where liking was operationalized as being offered a second date, lead to different conclusions. Their speed-dating data conforms to an asymmetric block design, and should have been analyzed using the social relations model, to unconfound the effects of the actor, partner, dyad, and gender. Social relations modeling showed that about a third of the variance of question asking can be attributed to a trait, but that another third of the variance can be attributed to the specific dyad, and some smaller portion of the variance can be attributed to the partner's tendency to elicit question asking. Bivariate social relations modeling showed that latent scores of follow-up questions and switch questions are largely isomorphic. Finally, asking an opposite sex partner questions tends to be inversely related to being offered a second date, at least for men. Based on theory, our reanalysis, and other empirical findings, we conclude that offering a second-date is not equivalent to liking, and that question asking is different from listening. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultural transmission in a food preparation task: The role of interactivity, innovation and storytelling

Interactive conversation drives the transmission of cultural information in small groups and large networks. In formal (e.g. schools) and informal (e.g. home) learning settings, interactivity does not only allow individuals and groups to faithfully transmit and learn new knowledge and skills, but also to boost cumulative cultural evolution. Here we investigate how interactivity affects performance, teaching, learning, innovation and chosen diffusion mode (e.g. instructional discourse vs. storytelling) of previously acquired information in a transmission chain experiment. In our experiment, participants (n = 288) working in 48 chains with three generations of pairs had to learn and complete a collaborative food preparation task (ravioli-making), and then transmit their experience to a new generation of participants in an interactive and non-interactive condition. Food preparation is a real-world task that it is taught and learned across cultures and transmitted over generations in families and groups. Pairs were defined as teachers or learners depending on their role in the transmission chain. The number of good exemplars of ravioli each pair produced was taken as measurement of performance. Contrary to our expectations, the results did not reveal that (1) performance increased over generations or that (2) interactivity in transmission sessions promoted increased performance. However, the results showed that (3) interactivity promoted the transmission of more information from teachers to learners; (4) increased quantity of information transmission from teachers led to higher performance in learners; (5) higher performance generations introduced more innovations in transmission sessions; (6) learners applied those transmitted innovations to their performance which made them persist over generations; (7) storytelling was specialized for the transmission of non-routine, unexpected information. Our findings offer new insights on how interactivity, innovation and storytelling affect the cultural transmission of complex collaborative tasks.

Engaging With Contemporary Dance: What Can Body Movements Tell us About Audience Responses?

In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. Do these movements provide clues to people's level of engagement with a performance? Our basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience-performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live from recorded performance and underpins live performers' moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analyzed using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The meaning of audience movements were analyzed by comparing clips of the audience at moments of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is an especially salient signal of audience engagement.

Facing the Language-Memory Problem in the Study of Autobiographical Memory

This paper discusses the problem of the role of language in autobiographical memory, that is barely considered in studies on autobiographical memories and narratives. As a matter of fact, most of the current studies on autobiographical memory confounded memory and narrative together. The present paper focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it debates how narratives contribute to the construction of autobiographical memories through self-other communication. Secondly, it reflects on how language and communication should be manipulated in studies about autobiographical memory. This paper is made of three sections: the first section discusses the role of language, particularly in the form of narrative, as a social tool by which autobiographical memories can be organised in a life story; the second section examines previous methods of investigation used in the study of autobiographical memories; finally, the third section proposes different methodological alternatives to overcome the problems emerging from our analysis of literature.

Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking

Hollywood movies can be deeply engaging and easy to understand. To succeed in this manner, feature‐length movies employ many editing techniques with strong psychological underpinnings. We explore the origins and development of one of these, the reaction shot. This shot typically shows a single, unspeaking character with modest facial expression in response to an event or to the behavior or speech of another character. In a sample of movies from 1940 to 2010, we show that the prevalence of one type of these shots—which we call the cryptic reaction shot—has grown dramatically. These shots are designed to enhance viewers’ emotional involvement with characters. They depict a facial gesture that reflects a slightly negative and slightly aroused emotional state. Their use at the end of conversations, and typically at the end of scenes, helps to leave viewers in a state of speculation about what the character is thinking and what her thoughts may mean for the ongoing narrative.

A reduced-dimensionality approach to uncovering dyadic modes of body motion in conversations

Face-to-face conversations are central to human communication and a fascinating example of joint action. Beyond verbal content, one of the primary ways in which information is conveyed in conversations is body language. Body motion in natural conversations has been difficult to study precisely due to the large number of coordinates at play. There is need for fresh approaches to analyze and understand the data, in order to ask whether dyads show basic building blocks of coupled motion. Here we present a method for analyzing body motion during joint action using depth-sensing cameras, and use it to analyze a sample of scientific conversations. Our method consists of three steps: defining modes of body motion of individual participants, defining dyadic modes made of combinations of these individual modes, and lastly defining motion motifs as dyadic modes that occur significantly more often than expected given the single-person motion statistics. As a proof-of-concept, we analyze the motion of 12 dyads of scientists measured using two Microsoft Kinect cameras. In our sample, we find that out of many possible modes, only two were motion motifs: synchronized parallel torso motion in which the participants swayed from side to side in sync, and still segments where neither person moved. We find evidence of dyad individuality in the use of motion modes. For a randomly selected subset of 5 dyads, this individuality was maintained for at least 6 months. The present approach to simplify complex motion data and to define motion motifs may be used to understand other joint tasks and interactions. The analysis tools developed here and the motion dataset are publicly available.

Flexible Coordination of Stationary and Mobile Conversations with Gaze: Resource Allocation among Multiple Joint Activities

Gaze is instrumental in coordinating face-to-face social interactions. But little is known about gaze use when social interactions co-occur with other joint activities. We investigated the case of walking while talking. We assessed how gaze gets allocated among various targets in mobile conversations, whether allocation of gaze to other targets affects conversational coordination, and whether reduced availability of gaze for conversational coordination affects conversational performance and content. In an experimental study, pairs were videotaped in four conditions of mobility (standing still, talking while walking along a straight-line itinerary, talking while walking along a complex itinerary, or walking along a complex itinerary with no conversational task). Gaze to partners was substantially reduced in mobile conversations, but gaze was still used to coordinate conversation via displays of mutual orientation, and conversational performance and content was not different between stationary and mobile conditions. Results expand the phenomena of multitasking to joint activities.

Robot Comedy Lab: experimenting with the social dynamics of live performance

The success of live comedy depends on a performer's ability to “work” an audience. Ethnographic studies suggest that this involves the co-ordinated use of subtle social signals such as body orientation, gesture, gaze by both performers and audience members. Robots provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of these signals experimentally. Using a life-size humanoid robot, programmed to perform a stand-up comedy routine, we manipulated the robot's patterns of gesture and gaze and examined their effects on the real-time responses of a live audience. The strength and type of responses were captured using SHORE™computer vision analytics. The results highlight the complex, reciprocal social dynamics of performer and audience behavior. People respond more positively when the robot looks at them, negatively when it looks away and performative gestures also contribute to different patterns of audience response. This demonstrates how the responses of individual audience members depend on the specific interaction they're having with the performer. This work provides insights into how to design more effective, more socially engaging forms of robot interaction that can be used in a variety of service contexts.

Conversational synchrony in the communicative interactions of individuals with traumatic brain injury

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE

To assess conversational synchrony in moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Conversational synchrony, assessed by the similarity and co-ordination of words and words per turn, allows for effective and efficient communication and enhances the development of rapport.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Eighteen participants with TBI (seven females) and 19 healthy comparison participants (CP; eight females) engaged in a 10-minute conversation with an unfamiliar partner.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Conversational synchrony was assessed in these conversations by measuring the degree to which the participants' productions of words and words per turn became more similar to one another over the course of the session.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

Significantly more sessions with participants with TBI (11/18 for words, 9/18 for words per turn) compared to CP sessions (5/19 for words, 4/19 for words per turns) did not display conversational synchrony. Likewise, synchrony was significantly correlated with subjective ratings of the interaction from raters who were blind to participant status and the study hypotheses.

CONCLUSIONS

These results suggest that TBI can disrupt conversational synchrony and can, in turn, negatively impact social perceptions. The relationship between impaired conversational synchrony and other social communicative deficits in TBI warrants further study.

Self-, other-, and joint monitoring using forward models

In the psychology of language, most accounts of self-monitoring assume that it is based on comprehension. Here we outline and develop the alternative account proposed by Pickering and Garrod (2013), in which speakers construct forward models of their upcoming utterances and compare them with the utterance as they produce them. We propose that speakers compute inverse models derived from the discrepancy (error) between the utterance and the predicted utterance and use that to modify their production command or (occasionally) begin anew. We then propose that comprehenders monitor other people’s speech by simulating their utterances using covert imitation and forward models, and then comparing those forward models with what they hear. They use the discrepancy to compute inverse models and modify their representation of the speaker’s production command, or realize that their representation is incorrect and may develop a new production command. We then discuss monitoring in dialogue, paying attention to sequential contributions, concurrent feedback, and the relationship between monitoring and alignment.

How retellings shape younger and older adults' memories

The way a story is retold influences the way it is later remembered; after retelling an event in a biased manner people subsequently remember the event in line with their distorted retelling. This study tested the hypothesis that this should be especially true for older adults. To test this, older and younger adults retold a story to be entertaining, to be accurate, or did not complete an initial retelling. Later, all participants recalled the story as accurately as possible. On this final test younger adults were unaffected by how they had previously retold the story. In contrast, older adults had better memory for the story's content and structure if they had previously retold the story accurately. Furthermore, for older adults, greater usage of storytelling language during the retelling was associated with lower subsequent recall. In summary, retellings exerted a greater effect on memory in older, compared with younger, adults.

Interactional convergence in conversational storytelling: when reported speech is a cue of alignment and/or affiliation

This paper investigates how and when interactional convergence is established by participants in conversation. We analyze sequences of storytelling using an original method that combines Conversation Analysis and a corpus-based approach. In storytelling, the participant in the position of “listener” is expected to produce either generic or specific responses adapted to the storyteller's narrative. The listener's behavior produced within the current activity is a cue of his/her interactional alignment. We show here that the listener can produce a specific type of (aligned) response, which we term a reported speech utterance in echo. The participant who is not telling the story is nonetheless able to animate the characters, while reversing the usual asymmetric roles of storyteller and listener. The use of this device is a way for the listener to display his/her stance toward the events told by the storyteller. If the listener's stance is congruent with that of the storyteller, this reveals a high degree of affiliation between the participants. We present seventeen excerpts from a collection of 94 instances of Echo Reported Speech (ERS) which we examined using the concepts of alignment and affiliation in order to show how different kinds of convergent sequences are constructed. We demonstrate that this phenomenon is mainly used by the listener to align and affiliate with the storyteller by means of reformulative, enumerative, or overbidding ERS. We also show that in affiliative sequences, reported speech can be used by the listener in a humorous way in order to temporarily disalign. This disalignment constitutes a potential starting point for an oblique sequence, which, if accepted and continued by the storyteller, gives rise to a highly convergent sequence.

Content-specific coordination of listeners' to speakers' EEG during communication

Cognitive neuroscience has recently begun to extend its focus from the isolated individual mind to two or more individuals coordinating with each other. In this study we uncover a coordination of neural activity between the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) of two people—a person speaking and a person listening. The EEG of one set of twelve participants (“speakers”) was recorded while they were narrating short stories. The EEG of another set of twelve participants (“listeners”) was recorded while watching audiovisual recordings of these stories. Specifically, listeners watched the superimposed videos of two speakers simultaneously and were instructed to attend either to one or the other speaker. This allowed us to isolate neural coordination due to processing the communicated content from the effects of sensory input. We find several neural signatures of communication: First, the EEG is more similar among listeners attending to the same speaker than among listeners attending to different speakers, indicating that listeners' EEG reflects content-specific information. Secondly, listeners' EEG activity correlates with the attended speakers' EEG, peaking at a time delay of about 12.5 s. This correlation takes place not only between homologous, but also between non-homologous brain areas in speakers and listeners. A semantic analysis of the stories suggests that listeners coordinate with speakers at the level of complex semantic representations, so-called “situation models”. With this study we link a coordination of neural activity between individuals directly to verbally communicated information.

Analyzing nonverbal listener responses using parallel recordings of multiple listeners

In this paper, we study nonverbal listener responses on a corpus with multiple parallel recorded listeners. These listeners were meant to believe that they were the sole listener, while in fact there were three persons listening to the same speaker. The speaker could only see one of the listeners. We analyze the impact of the particular setup of the corpus on the behavior and perception of the two types of listeners: the listeners that could be seen by the speaker and the listeners that could not be seen. Furthermore, we compare the nonverbal listening behaviors of these three listeners to each other with regard to timing and form. We correlate these behaviors with behaviors of the speaker, like pauses and whether the speaker is looking at the listeners or not.

Inattentive Listening Undermines Self-Verification in Personal Storytelling

Two studies explore the narrative construction of self-perceptions in conversational storytelling among pairs of same-sex friends. Specifically, the studies examined how listener behavior can support or undermine attempts to self-verify in personal storytelling. In two studies (n=100 dyads), speakers told attentive, distracted, or disagreeable (Study 1 only) friends about a recent experience. Distracted, but not disagreeable, friends tended to undermine participants' attempts to verify their self-perception of being interested in an activity (Study 1) or their self-perception that an event was typical for them (Study 2). These results support the notion that friends can be an important source of influence on self-perceptions and, perhaps surprisingly, suggest that responsiveness from friends, rather than agreement per se, may be crucial for supporting self-verification processes.