Temporal coordination of head motion in couples with history of interpersonal violence

Previous research in automated expression analysis has focused on discrete actions with little attention to their timing either within or between persons. We investigated the interpersonal coordination of rigid head motion in 11 intimate couples with a history of interpersonal violence. The couples participated in both a low-conflict task in which they were asked to discuss a neutral topic as well as a high-conflict task in which they were asked to discuss an issue that was cause for conflict. Actor-partner analysis, which explicitly models that each partner is both a cause and an effect of the other's behavior, was used to investigate differences between conditions in angular head velocities. Windowed crosscorrelation was used to model interpersonal dynamics. Angular head velocities were slower for men than for their partners. Head velocities were strongly correlated between partners, with frequent shifts in lead-lag relationships between them.