Abstract

Research has found that users participating in dyadic activities, particularly those of a musical nature, tend to synchronize in various ways. It was also found that this synchrony is affected by the users' emotional state and affect. In this study, we aim to introduce the beginnings of establishing a synchrony score between people, as well as varying the emotional context of the users to study its effects on the established synchrony, and the score. We set up a completely virtual experiment where participants that do not know previously each other (some were acquaintances) were matched together (n = 10 dyads). The experiment had the participants dancing 4 different dances trying to mimic an avatar as closely as they could , where they were graded on how closely they mimicked it, with their partners also mimicking the avatar, visible on their screen, with their own rating, and a combined rating for both participants; the rating the participants received was modified for certain dances to induce frustration, and test its effect on synchrony. In our efforts to establish a synchrony score, we create a similarity score which is a simple Procrustes distance. We find that the similarity score between participants is 11.8\% better when they are experiencing the same level of difficulty. We also find that, when experiencing the same level of difficulty, the similarity between the participants is 19.6\% better than the similarity between either participant and the avatar; this number goes down to only 5.3\% better than similarity with the avatar for scenarios with different difficulty modifiers.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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