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.
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