Face-to-Face: Interpersonal Coordination Variation in Human Dyadic Interactions

Humans are an innately social species that consistently respond to cues that are prevalent across their social interactions. Scholars have theorized that these behavioral responses occur primarily through two distinct interpersonal coordination processes: behavioral mimicry and interactional synchrony. Many inconsistencies remain, however, between operationalizing and measuring instances of each behavioral process. Furthermore, a lack of research has attempted to assess the prevalence of each behavioral process as part of the same social interaction, which would allow for a greater understanding of whether each process diverges from the other. This paper aimed to help clarify the existing literature by examining university students' smile patterns during video interactions that took place over Zoom. Across interactions, female pairs spent significantly more time smiling as a proportion of their interaction than male pairs. Moreover, both female and male pairs exhibited stronger patterns of behavioral mimicry than interactional synchrony, favoring the use of a delayed pattern of social responding. The present work provides exploratory evidence to suggest that humans temporally delay their smiles to match their conversational partner's during social interactions.