9 - What Microanalysis of Behavior in Social Situations Can Reveal about Relationships across the Life Span

Summary

OVERVIEW

During face-to-face social interaction, partners engage in a momentto-moment exchange of behaviors. Each person's smiles, vocalizations, gestures, emotions, and physiological states may vary in predictable ways over time, based on characteristic individual activity rhythms or social scripts. Behaviors may also change in response to changes in partner behaviors (Jones & Gerard, 1967). Global impressions of the quality of a social interaction such as judgments about responsiveness or rapport may be at least partly based on activity patterns and coordination (Bernieri, Reznick, & Rosenthal, 1988; Cappella, 1997). Furthermore, long-term “health” of relationships may depend upon how the partners communicate responsiveness and involvement through their behavioral engagement in everyday social interactions.

MICROANALYSIS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

The Conceptual Terrain

The term microanalysis will be used here to refer to any study of social interaction that involves collection of detailed information about the behavior, affect, or physiology of social interaction participants over time. For example, a microanalytic study might involve coding on/off talk and silence patterns four times a second during a 10-minute conversation between two friends. Most microanalytic studies have sampled behaviors at rates ranging from several times a second up to once a minute. Microanalytic data are sometimes summarized in simple ways, for example, by computing the proportion of time spent in each behavioral state, or the overall mean level of physiological arousal or affective involvement.