Mutual emotional understanding in a face-to-face communication environment: How speakers understand and react to listeners' emotion in a game task dialog

A study investigated how accurately a listener understood a speaker's emotion and whether the believed emotional synchrony was observed more often than actual emotional synchrony due to the listener's inaccurate emotional understanding of the speaker. Two types of task-oriented dyadic dialogs (a competitive task and a cooperative task) were recorded, and subjective evaluations of the speakers' dynamic emotional state were conducted. The results of the correlation tests between the self-evaluation and the listeners' evaluation of the speakers' emotion revealed that the mean correlation coefficients among the pairs were low. This finding implies that the listeners did not understand the speakers' emotion accurately during the competitive task or the cooperative task dialogs. Moreover, the result of the analysis of variance of each pair's correlation coefficients of the evaluation of each emotion with the factors of task and type of synchrony revealed significant main effects of the type of synchrony and showed marginally significant interactions between the task and the types of synchrony for arousal and positivity.