Eye Synchrony: A Method to Capture Mutual and Joint Attention in Social Eye Movements

Gaze behavior represents a complex phenomenon in social inter-action. We focus here on dyadic face-to-face interaction during naturally occurring verbal exchanges, where shared attention can be operationalized by joint gazes and eye contact. A multi-step methodology for the analysis of eye synchrony is presented, exemplified by a single case. The dynamics of face-to-face interaction allows estimating the degree of interlocutors' synchrony. While there is growing evidence for interpersonal synchrony of various behavioral and physiological signals, eye synchrony has not yet been studied outside the laboratory. The method presented is based on time series of gaze behavior acquired by mobile eye tracking devices. We applied windowed cross-correlations to the data and used surrogate testing to attain effect sizes even for single interactions (Surrogate Synchrony, SUSY). SUSY thus integrates nomo-thetic with idiographic research goals: The nomothetic interest is to test hypotheses that gaze behavior may be generally synchronized and linked with psychological variables. The idiographic aspect is that effect sizes can be determined even in single-case studies owing to the surrogate analyses, which supports qualitative research. Results of the exemplary dataset suggested that proof-of-concept of this approach was attained. We describe what prerequisites are needed of a setting and technical setup for use in future studies of psychotherapy, counseling, negotiations, or work-related interactions.

Positioning Shifts From Told Self to Performative Self in Psychotherapy

According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings:

• Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting.

• In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self.

• Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior.

• Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.

Deixis, Meta-Perceptive Gaze Practices, and the Interactional Achievement of Joint Attention

The paper investigates the use of gaze along with deictics and embodied pointing to accomplish reference and joint attention in naturally occurring social interaction. It assumes that deixis, in its primordial use in face-to-face interaction, is an embodied phenomenon that involves gestural pointing as well as visual perception, thus giving rise to recurring gaze practices of the participants. The analysis draws on a model of the interactional organization of deictic reference and joint attention that serves as a sequential framework for investigating the functions of eye gaze. The analysis focuses on two meta-perceptive practices: gaze following and gaze monitoring. It shows that the use of these practices in naturally occurring social activities is context dependent, positionally sensitive, tied to participant roles, and temporally fine-tuned to the stream of the participants' verbal and embodied conduct. The sequential analysis of these practices further documents that meta-perceptive gaze practices contribute to the constitution of joint attention as mutually known by the participants. The data for this study were recorded with two pairs of mobile eye tracking glasses and an external camera. Methodologically situated within the framework of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics where video recording is used, the study breaks new ground by employing a technology almost exclusively applied in experimental frameworks to record ordinary social activities "in the wild." In striving for ecologically valid and precise eye gaze data, it also contributes to a refinement of concepts developed in experimental paradigms by adapting them to qualitative research within the field of multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics.