Embodied Synchrony of Nonverbal Behaviour in Counselling: a Case Study of Role Playing School Counselling

Experienced counsellors have mentioned that the clientcounsellor relationship, which is of high importance in counselling, may be related to embodied synchrony of nonverbal behaviour, but there is little quantitative research on the topic. The present study captured the embodied synchrony of nonverbal behaviour in counselling from a multiple communication channel perspective, in order to examine the relationship between these channels. At the same time, the relation between embodied synchrony and the mental processes of the client or counsellor, such as the sense of trust between counsellor and client, was investigated. 9-24 participants rated visual and vocal embodied synchrony and sense of trust in role-playing school counselling scenes. The results indicated that embodied synchrony, such as body movement coordination, similarity of voice strength and coordination and smoothness of response timing, have a cooccurrence relation. Moreover, significant correlations with evaluated sense of trust suggested that embodied synchrony can act as an indicator reflecting the mental process of a client or counsellor. Counselling is a dialogue between a client and a counsellor who is a skilled listener, and is performed with the purpose of overcoming the client’s mental difficulties or obstacles. The counsellor's verbal/nonverbal responses are experientially known to encourage the client's speech, and have the assistance function of guiding the client's thinking from a "confused state" to a "regulated state". Conventionally, in the case of investigating and evaluating counselling, the counsellor’s verbal responses are examined as the key element, and only rarely attention is directed towards nonverbal responses. However, we may assume that nonverbal responses are also playing an important role in counselling. It is expected that analyzing the counsellor's nonverbal behaviour would give an important cue also about the characteristics of the response style of listeners in daily conversations. In this study, embodied synchrony is focused upon as a cue to investigating nonverbal behaviour in counselling. Embodied synchrony is a phenomenon in which the interactants’ nonverbal behaviour synchronizes and becomes similar; the listener's movements of the head or arms may synchronize with the flow of the speaker's speech, or the way of speaking, postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions may become similar (e.g. Cappella, 1981; Hess, Philippot, & Blairy, 1999; Feldstein & Welkowitz, 1978; Cheng & Chartrand, 2003). Up to the present, embodied synchrony has been described qualitatively by the subjective impressions of skilled counsellors with abundant experience in counselling, and has been considered to indicate the client-counsellor relationship, which is thought to be of primary importance in counselling. There is also some research which indicates quantitatively the congruence of posture in counselling dialogues (e.g. Charny, 1966), as well as other studies that indicate the relation between embodied synchrony, such as congruence of posture, duration of pauses or response latencies (i.e., latency before responding to the partner's last utterance), synchrony of body movements, and empathy (Maurer & Tindall, 1983; Staples & Sloane, 1976; Hall, Harrigan, & Rosenthal, 1995; Bernieri, Davis, Rosenthal, & Knee, 1994). For measuring the degree of embodied synchrony of nonverbal behaviour, a method suggested by Bernieri & Rosenthal (1991) has been used. This method consists in judges evaluating directly the degree of the overall embodied synchrony in order to quantify it. As opposed to the conventional single-channel approach in which attention is directed towards a particular channel which is examined in detail, this method attempts at capturing nonverbal behaviour on a multi-channel level. However, this method cannot take paralanguage into consideration. To our knowledge, there has been no such method that allowed quantifying vocal synchrony overall. Therefore, in this study, an attempt to quantify vocal embodied synchrony overall, adapting Bernieri et al. 's method to measure vocal embodied synchrony, in addition to quantifying embodied synchrony of body movement using this method, is carried out. In other words, it is one of this work’s purposes to capture embodied synchrony from a multi-channel perspective. The necessity for investigating embodied synchrony on a multi-channel level was implied by Hall et al. (1995). In the present study, it is also examined whether embodied synchrony occurs as a