Body Gesture and Head Movement Analyses in Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction as Indicators of Relationship

Parent-child nonverbal communication plays a crucial role in understanding their relationships and assessing their interaction styles. However, prior works have seldom studied the exchange of these nonverbal cues between the dyad and focused on isolated cues from one person at a time. In contrast, this work analyzes both parents' and children's individual and dyadic nonverbal behaviors in relation to their four relationship characteristics, i.e., child temperament, parenting style, parenting stress, and home literacy environment. We utilize a state-of-the-art feature selection framework on a dataset of 31 parent-child interactions to automatically extract and select a set of temporal nonverbal behaviors as key indicators of the dyad's relationship characteristics. The results show that relationship characteristics were associated with both individuals' and dyads' nonverbal behaviors. This finding highlights the importance of accounting for both individual- and dyad-scale nonverbal behaviors when predicting dyadic relationship characteristics as well as the potential limitations of utilizing single persons' nonverbal data in isolation. It therefore motivates future work on this topic to take a holistic and relational approach. The dataset and extracted nonverbal data are made public to aid the development of automated detection tools for parent-child relationship characteristics that trains on visual recordings of their dyadic interactions.