Cognitive Processing Effects of ‘Social Resonance’ in Interaction

Cognitive Processing Effects of ‘Social Resonance’ in Interaction. Susan Duncan (deng@uchicago.edu), Amy Franklin (alfrankl@midway.uchicago.edu), Fey Parrill (feyparr@uchicago.edu), Haleema Welji (haleemaw@uchicago.edu) Psychology Department, University of Chicago 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 Irene Kimbara (ikimbara@uchicago.edu) Linguistics Department, University of Chicago 1010 E. 59 th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 Rebecca Webb (webb@bcs.rochester.edu) Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Lattimore Hall, Rochester, NY 14534 -or, conversely---remain inactive, or even be inhibited by, respectively, presence or absence of social resonance. Kimbara and Parrill present recent work on the interaction between gestural mirroring (specifically, cases in which a speaker appears unconsciously to adjust her use of gesture space, in accord with her interlocutor’s use of space, to create matching nonverbal expression of spatial layouts) and ‘structural priming’ (Bock, 1986), or, the ways in which one speaker’s choice of syntactic construction influences the subsequent choice of construction on the part of her interlocutor. Webb examines types of metaphoric gestures (McNeill, 1992), spontaneously produced by speakers addressing an audience, with respect to their roles in managing the interactive context (Bavelas, 1992). Welji and Duncan examine gestures in spontaneous narrative discourse, comparing interlocutors who are strangers (less socially resonant) with interlocutors who are friends (more resonant). Franklin and Duncan demonstrate perturbation of social resonance, as a function of cognitive load, in dyads where one member is instructed to deceive the other about the visual and narrative content of a cartoon story eliciting stimulus, viewed on video. This symposium will consist of four presentations of recent work that examine the cognitive aspects of ‘social resonance’ in interaction. By social resonance, we mean the state of being that pertains when individuals engaged in face-to-face communication feel strongly connected. The studies we will present elaborate and extend a wealth of findings, primarily from social psychology and anthropology, on a set of closely related concepts; e.g., ‘interpersonal sensitivity’ (Hall & Bernieri, 2001), ‘social glue’ (Lakin, et al., 2003), ‘interactional synchrony’ (Bernieri & Rosenthal, 1991), empathy (Sonnby-Borgstrom, et al. 2003, Nishio, 2002), and ‘socially distributed cognition’ (DuBois, 2000). In choosing the term SOCIAL RESONANCE , we seek to emphasize the dyad or group as a focal level of analysis and theory. Resonance also evokes the dynamic interplay of behaviors, multi-modally, between participants in real time interactions. The social psychological notion of ‘rapport,’ as well as recent-era reformulations of anthropologist Malinowki’s (1923) construct, ‘phatic communion,’ resemble the sense of social resonance we employ here: “… all the different communicative strands, speech, gesture, posture, body movements, orientation, proximity, eye contact, and facial expressions … woven together to form the fabric of conversation,” (Laver, 1975). Social resonance has been the focus of research across quite a range of scientific disciplines. Its presence in interaction is ascertained on the basis of behavioral observables that occur singly and in clusters, or in patterns of alternation or sequential unfolding across an interval of interaction. Examples include mimicry or ‘mirroring’ of various nonverbal behaviors, interactional rhythm in conversation, and syntactic priming. The work presented here takes up where many social psychological and anthropological treatments of resonance phenomena leave off, by examining its impact on real-time cognitive processing; specifically, on processes of language production and comprehension. Our studies illuminate, through close analysis of the multi-modal (speech and gesture) aspects of human interaction, what psycholinguistic processing mechanisms may be triggered by, facilitated by-- Selected References Bavelas, J.B., et al. (1992). Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes, 15:469-489. Bernieri, F.J. & Rosenthal, R. (1991). Interpersonal coordination: Behavior matching and interactional synchrony. In R.S. Feldman & B. Rime (eds.), Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Bock, J.K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387. Lakin, J.L., Jefferis, V.E., Cheng, C.M., & Chartrand, T.L. (2003). The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry. J. Nonverbal Behavior, 27(3), 145-162. McNeill, David (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago press. Vrij, et al. (2000). Detecting deceit via analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior. J. Nonverbal Behavior, 24(4),