The Effects of Pre-task Team Collaboration on Facial Expression and Speech Entrainment

Introduction. Many everyday tasks are complex and require the coordination of one or more individuals. Such tasks can be relatively simple like passing a ball to a friend during a game of catch, while others are more complex such as performing a life-saving surgery where surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses all work together in a multi-person team [1]. Such coordination requires the appropriate allocation of cognitive and behavioral effort to meet the changing demands of their environment and cannot be completed alone [1]. These mutually cooperative behaviors can include team communication, body position and even affective cues [2]. Some behaviors are explicitly controlled to be coordinated [3] (e.g., when an individual purposely attempts to follow the behaviors of their teammate or team leader), while others are implicit or unconscious. Presently, these shared behaviors have been referred to as entrainment [4] [5], mimicry [6] [7] and even action matching [8] [9]; however, the specific term used typically refers to the underlying theoretical cause for the phenomenon. Theoretically, entrainment can be explained as the spontaneous interpersonal coupling that occurs because the behavior of one or more individuals is affected by another’s behavior in a closed loop system. Additionally, such behavior is typically evident when working on a mutual, goal-directed task [10]. Therefore, for the purposes of this paper we will refer to the cooperative behaviors between teammates that support problem solving as entrainment.