More than Face-to-Face: Empathy Effects of Video Framing

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Summary:

In this paper, David T. Nguyen of Accenture Technology Labs and John Canny of UC Berkeley's Institute of Design present their research about the effectiveness of different videoconferencing techniques in the context of empathic interaction.  The authors first cover some of the basic benefits of videoconferencing (time and money-saving for business interactions) as well as some of its shortcomings (lower degree of trust, decreased measure of non-verbal cues, disparities in gaze matching).  They mentioned several previous bodies of work (mainly pertaining to gaze preservation) and established their central hypothesis -- that the correct framing of the subjects in a video conference could reduce or eliminate any disparities between it and a face-to-face meeting. A basic hierarchy was established: 

• participants (or dyads) in face-to-face meetings exhibit the highest level of empathy
• dyads in upper-body-framed video meetings exhibit the next highest level of empathy
• dyads in head-only-framed video meetings exhibit the lowest level of empathy

Based on the findings of their study (which consisted of 62 test sessions with the various types of meeting/framing), the authors then presented some design guidelines for video systems that would ensure the highest level of dyad empathy in video conferences.  These basically consisted of measures that framed the participants' upper bodies and allowed the greatest amount of non-verbal body-language cues to be detected.

Discussion:

The old sci-fi B-movie staple of the "videophone" has become rather commonplace now with the inclusion of integrated webcams and chat software in most commercially-available laptops.  Users can place video calls to people across the planet (via Skype or other video conferencing client) and have empathic interactions in real-time.  Based on my own personal experience with video conferencing, I can attest that framing which favors the transmission of non-verbal cues are the most effective; much of the authors' research provided unsurprising results in this regard.  The most intriguing thing to me was the concept of gaze-matching.  This is often the one part of video conferencing that I (and high-powered business-types around the world) find the most trouble with -- dyads can never really make "eye contact" in a video conference, and some of the systems they discussed presented some cool solutions to this problem.