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Journal of Nonverbal Behavior

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01-12-2014 | Original Paper

Emotional Transactions in the Paris Subway: Combining Naturalistic Videotaping, Objective Facial Coding and Sequential Analysis in the Study of Nonverbal Emotional Behavior

Authors: Martin Aranguren, Stéphane Tonnelat

Published in: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior | Issue 4/2014

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Abstract

We report on what, to our knowledge, represents the first study of nonverbal emotional behavior in crowded public places combining naturalistic videotaping of situated activity, objective coding of facial movement, and sequential analysis of behavior. In the first part of the study we argue that passengers do not lose emotional sensitivity to physical contact as density (passengers per square meter) increases, which indicates that physical contact is experienced as a territorial intrusion regardless of crowdedness. In the second part of the study, we suggest that passengers resolve the emotions due to intrusive physical contacts through two interactional strategies involving facial movements usually interpreted as “expressions of emotions.” Since proxemic violations seem to represent a pervasive emotion elicitor, the protocol can be extended to other means of transportation and replicated in other locations. We conclude that the methodology provides an effective tool for theory-building in the study of nonverbal emotional behavior.

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According to data released by the RATP, traffic increased over 25 % between 2000 and 2011, reaching a high yearly number of 1,500 million travels.

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That is, we did not count all observable contacts and then calculated the ratio of contacts followed by facial responses. Neither did we consider facial changes that were not preceded by observable physical contacts.

In mathematics, a bijection or one-to-one correspondence is a function giving an exact pairing of the elements of two sets. By analogy, a bijective contact incident involves one author of the contact and only one receiver. A non bijective incident, in contrast, involves one author and two or more receivers.

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The two streams were synchronized with the program Elan (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, n.d.) using for each pair of files, as a common point of reference, the moment when the doors close.

Keltner’s prototype includes, in order or appearance: gaze down, smile control (e.g., lip press), smile, head away, gaze shifts.

An event using one of these ad hoc categories is, for example, “Patient looks Author”. In all the cases in which the code looks was attributed to the patient, we based the attribution on 1) a previously attributed head and eye movement descriptor as defined by the FACS and 2) a reasonable guess about what the patient was looking at. If we thought that patient was looking at author, but no head and eye movement could be coded, the look itself was not coded.

In order to specify who was the patient (the person receiving the contact) and who was the author of the contact, we used the codes “cp” and “ca”. If the individual taken as the point of reference was the patient, the contact event was coded “cp”; if she was the author, it was coded “ca”. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows we use the expression “physical contact”, but the type of event to which reference is made is more precisely “cp”.

For these t-patterns the program Theme^® was set at significance level 0.0001.

Combining systematic coding and perception of behavioral configurations (or wholes) is one of the usual descriptive procedures of classical ethology (Lorenz 2003).

Some researchers claim that the asymmetric AU14 is the universal contempt expression (Ekman and Friesen 1986; Ekman and Heider 1988), but the symmetric and asymmetric appearances of AU14 occupy the same sequential slots in the behavior patterns that we found. Hence, there is nothing in these patterns that could indicate a different meaning for each appearance of AU14.

In order to constrain the inevitable arbitrariness of time window duration, we took the duration of the longest t-pattern as the point of reference for this backward-looking time window.

We refrained from using a more stringent sequential association analysis because we were less interested in establishing causal links than in finding descriptive similarities between p3 and p4.

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Title: Emotional Transactions in the Paris Subway: Combining Naturalistic Videotaping, Objective Facial Coding and Sequential Analysis in the Study of Nonverbal Emotional Behavior
Authors: Martin Aranguren
Stéphane Tonnelat
Publication date: 01-12-2014
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior / Issue 4/2014
Print ISSN: 0191-5886
Electronic ISSN: 1573-3653
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0193-1

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