Group Dynamics: Survey of Existing Multimodal Models and Considerations for Social Mediation

TL;DR

This survey reviews existing multimodal models of group dynamics crucial for social mediator robots, emphasizing their role in understanding human interactions and proposing relational affect as a promising modeling approach.

Contribution

The paper categorizes and analyzes current models of group dynamics in social mediation, highlighting multimodal features and advocating for relational affect modeling.

Findings

Models cover social dominance, affect, cohesion, conflict, engagement

Multimodal features are key to capturing interpersonal dynamics

Relational affect offers a promising approach for social mediation

Abstract

Social mediator robots facilitate human-human interactions by producing behavior strategies that positively influence how humans interact with each other in social settings. As robots for social mediation gain traction in the field of human-human-robot interaction, their ability to "understand" the humans in their environments becomes crucial. This objective requires models of human understanding that consider multiple humans in an interaction as a collective entity and represent the group dynamics that exist among its members. Group dynamics are defined as the influential actions, processes, and changes that occur within and between group interactants. Since an individual's behavior may be deeply influenced by their interactions with other group members, the social dynamics existing within a group can influence the behaviors, attitudes, and opinions of each individual and the group as a whole. Therefore, models of group dynamics are critical for a social mediator robot to be effective in its role. In this paper, we survey existing models of group dynamics and categorize them into models of social dominance, affect, social cohesion, conflict resolution, and engagement. We highlight the multimodal features these models utilize, and emphasize the importance of capturing the interpersonal aspects of a social interaction. Finally, we make a case for models of relational affect as an approach that may be able to capture a representation of human-human interactions that can be useful for social mediation.