Paper Blogs 05

Reference Paper

Nonverbal Synchrony and Rapport: Analysis by the Cross-Lag Panel Technique

Marianne LaFrance

(Digital Object Identifier 10.2307/3033875)

Overview of the Paper

During the second half of the last century, many studies were performed by the psychology research community to investigate how a good rapport is established. This paper also investigated different aspects of developing a rapport. The hypothesis proposed by the author was that posture sharing may be influential in establishing a rapport.

Some studies were performed before, but those are less clear cut due to several factors. The author mentioned that those studies had the limitation of less iteration, very difficult explanations to replicate, not reliably measured rapport and tended to avoid inferential statistics.

In this paper, the authors propose and try to investigate the influence of posture sharing (PS) in establishing a rapport (R). To find out the degree to which PS and R are positively correlates, four scenarios are explained. First, a positive correlation between PS and R may be possible due to an unmeasured third factor. Second, PS and R may be causing each other by positive feedback. Third, PS may be influenced by R. Finally, PS may play the dominant role to establish R.

Data was collected from a college class taken during a six-week summer session. First during the initial week, the classes were videotaped; and during the last week classes were videotaped again. Posture sharing and rapport were evaluated among the students and the instructors.

 

Evaluation and Validity of the Paper

From the graded sheet by the students about the rapport generation and checked by a third coder later, the analysis of the study was performed. The author presented cross-lag analysis to show the experimental result. It showed that posture sharing and rapport were positively correlated. Although the cross-lag analysis differential result was not significant, the direction of the result supported the author’s hypothesis.

 

Improvement Scopes

In my opinion, the future work should include multi-modal data for this research. At the time of the experiment, only the video data was recorded. May be multi-modal data will help to establish the hypothesis with better confidence.  

 

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “Group rapport: Posture sharing as a non- verbal indicator”, by Marianne LaFrance and Maida Broadbent [2] (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1177/105960117600100307). In the cited article, the authors presented another study to investigate the relationship among the posture sharing and establishing a rapport in a group.

[1] M. LaFrance, “Nonverbal synchrony and rapport: Analysis by the cross-lag panel technique,” Social Psychology Quarterly, pp. 66–70, 1979.

[2] M. LaFrance and M. Broadbent, “Group rapport: Posture sharing as a nonverbal indicator,” Group & Organization Management, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 328–333, 1976.