Abstract

Introduction. Motion Energy Analysis (MEA) is a procedure that allows to automatically assess the amount of persons’ movement from video recordings. Recent studies used MEA to investigate nonverbal synchrony, i.e., the occurrence of simultaneous movement, suggesting the existence of an association with relationship quality. In patient-therapist dyads, synchrony predicted therapeutic alliance, empathy, as well as treatment outcome. Package description . The article presents rMEA, an open-source R package that allows to import, filter, and visualize dyadic time-series of nonverbal behaviour generated by other MEA software. The package includes a fast, state-of-the-art, moving window cross-correlation algorithm with lag analysis, which provides a user-friendly interface for the assessment of nonverbal synchrony. Through the analysis of a motivating example (40 psychotherapy intake interviews split between dropouts and good cases) the article provides an in-depth description of the package main functions and a tutorial for a typical analysis in this field, requiring only the most basic knowledge of the R language and environment. The rich visualization capabilities of the software provide powerful tools for the various steps involved in the diagnostics, analysis, interpretation and publication of these data. Conclusions. Overall, the paper aims to empower psychotherapy researchers and other interaction scientists to investigate nonverbal synchrony in their own dyads.

摘要

引言。运动能量分析（MEA）是一种程序，可以自动评估视频记录中人员的活动量。最近的研究使用MEA来研究非语言同步性，即同时运动的发生，表明存在与关系质量的关联。在患者-治疗师二元组中，同步预测了治疗联盟，同理心和治疗结果。包装说明 。本文介绍了rMEA，这是一个开放源代码R包，允许导入，过滤和可视化由其他MEA软件生成的非语言行为的二元时间序列。该软件包包括一个带有滞后分析的快速，最新的移动窗口互相关算法，该算法为评估非语言同步性提供了一个用户友好的界面。通过对一个激励性例子的分析（在辍学和好案例之间分为40个心理治疗入学面试），本文提供了该软件包主要功能的深入描述，并提供了该领域典型分析的教程，只需要以下方面的最基本知识即可： R语言和环境。该软件的丰富可视化功能为诊断，分析，结论 总体而言，本文旨在增强心理治疗研究人员和其他互动科学家的能力，以研究他们自己的二元组中的非语言同步性。