ABSTRACT
The interest in studying individual differences in face-to-face interaction derived from ongoing work on describing the process of face-to-face interaction. Social psychologists seized on nonverbal communication with considerable enthusiasm because it seemed to provide a direct view of the individual's inner reactions, transient states, and longer term personality characteristics. Actions readily apparent in interaction were considered to be a kind of behavioral X-ray of the subjects' inner states. Invaluable information on these inner workings could be gathered by simply observing the individual in interaction with others. The defining characteristic of a simple-rate variable is that it contains no information on interaction sequences. The investigator knows only how many times or for how long an action occurred over some stretch of interaction. There is no information on where the action occurred in the stream of interaction relative to other actions by the participant and the partner.
