Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The nature of the dynamics of nonverbal interactions is of con-siderable interest to the study of human communication andfuture human-computer interaction. Facial expressions consti-tute an important source of nonverbal social signals. Whereasmost studies have focused on the facial expressions of iso-lated individuals, the aim of this study is to explore the cou-pling dynamics of facial expressions in social dyadic interac-tions. Using a special experimental set-up, the frontal facialdynamics of pairs of socially interacting persons were mea-sured and analyzed simultaneously. We introduce the use ofconvergent cross mapping, a method originating from dynam-ical systems theory, to assess the causal coupling of the dyadicfacial-expression dynamics. The results reveal the presence ofbidirectional causal couplings of the facial dynamics. We con-clude that convergent cross mapping yields encouraging resultsin establishing evidence for causal behavioral interactions.