Recognizing Perceived Interdependence in Face-to-Face Negotiations through Multimodal Analysis of Nonverbal Behavior

Enabling computer-based applications to display intelligent behavior in complex social settings requires them to relate to important aspects of how humans experience and understand such situations. One crucial driver of peoples' social behavior during an interaction is the interdependence they perceive, i.e., how the outcome of an interaction is determined by their own and others' actions. According to psychological studies, both the nonverbal behavior displayed by Motivated by this, we present a series of experiments to automatically recognize interdependence perceptions in dyadic face-to-face negotiations using these sources. Concretely, our approach draws on a combination of features describing individuals' Facial, Upper Body, and Vocal Behavior with state-of-the-art algorithms for multivariate time series classification. Our findings demonstrate that differences in some types of interdependence perceptions can be detected through the automatic analysis of nonverbal behaviors. We discuss implications for developing socially intelligent systems and opportunities for future research.