Skip to main content

Lin – Nonverbal Synchrony in Long-Term Romantic Relationships: Testing for Associations with Relationship Length, Rapport, and Love in the Moment

 

Nonverbal Synchrony in Long-Term Romantic Relationships: Testing for Associations with Relationship Length, Rapport, and Love in the Moment (2024)

Undergraduate: Susan Lin


Faculty Advisor: Algoe Sara
Department: Psychology

Nonverbal synchrony is a component of Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal’s 1990 model of rapport that is hypothesized to increase over the duration of social relationships. In this model of rapport, the relative importance of nonverbal synchrony to interactants’ perceptions of their own rapport is also hypothesized to increase over the duration of their relationship. We tested these hypotheses in a sample of 154 romantic couples. Specifically, we predicted that nonverbal synchrony in an unstructured interaction would be associated with relationship length as well as with perceptions of rapport and of momentary feelings of love in the interaction. Furthermore, we predicted that relationship length would moderate associations between nonverbal synchrony and the two other dependent variables; that is, we hypothesized that associations would be stronger in couples who had been together longer. Video recordings of romantic couples engaging in a discussion with their partners about how they first met were coded for nonverbal synchrony using the pose estimation software OpenPose and dynamic time warping. Contrary to expectations, we did not find any associations between nonverbal synchrony and relationship length, rapport, or love in the moment in the present study. Our study also highlights challenges and future directions for using AI-driven computer vision software to code nonverbal synchrony.