The effect of psychological mirroring in telecommunicative dialogue

Abstract

In this work we investigate the phenomenon of emotional mirroring using remotely diagnosed dynamic parameters of facial expressions. The research is based on the fact that mirroring is the subconscious adjustment and copying of the dynamics of another person. We considered a reflection of face expression as a reproduction of emotions of one person by another. To obtain this behavior we used an induced cognitive–emotional conflict in the process of telecommunication dialogue. The conflict was initiated by a psychologist or by short videoclips with surprise endings. Since the communication in a telecommunication form limits non-verbal information about the interlocutor with respect to the normal dialogue, we have also investigated the hypothesis of whether the phenomenon of mirroring is detectable in such conditions. We developed a computer program using VGG16-based artificial neural network to mark people’s emotional reactions in video data automatically. The processed material consisted of 24 interview recordings with the participants of both genders and three qualified expert psychologists. We used different types of interviews: interviews based on self-attitude techniques, problematic interviews based on transactional analysis, free reasoning about controversial and topical situations. The communication topics were selected with respect to the age and other indicators of the group of participants. It was found that the parameters of facial expressions of the participant and the experimenter (psychologist) identified by the program strongly correlate with emotions such as happiness, sadness and surprise. Notable negative correlations were found between the parameters of the happiness of participant and fear of psychologist, sad of the participant and happiness of the psychologist, sad of psychologist and surprise of the participant. A direct relationship between sad of participant and fear of psychologist was detected. All of the identified correlations appear both in the situation with and without cognitive–emotional conflict. However, the degree of their manifestation was quite different for these two cases.