Medical Xpress December 8, 2025
People have long turned to support groups to find assurance and connection from others with similar experiences in dealing with some of life’s most difficult situations. But little is known about which nonverbal behaviors, especially in a virtual group session, identify whether two people are connecting. New research from the University of Kansas and University of Southern California measures the behavioral markers of alliance between support group participants.
The work appears in the Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.
Researchers analyzed data from 18 support groups with 96 participants. They measured dyadic alliance, the connection between two individuals, by surveying participants about how connected they felt with each other. Using computational algorithms to detect verbal and nonverbal...
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