Leaders and Followers Identified by Emotional Mimicry During Collaborative Learning: A Facial Expression Recognition Study on Emotional Valence

This article explores the potential of emotional mimicry in identifying the leader and follower students in collaborative learning settings. Our data include video recorded interactions of 24 high school students who worked together in groups of three during a collaborative exam. A facial emotions recognition method was used to capture participants’ facial emotions during the collaborative work. Cross-recurrence quantification analysis was applied on the detected facial emotions to see the level and direction of emotional mimicry among the dyads in the same groups. In order to validate the cross-recurrence quantification analysis results, student interactions in terms of leading or following the task were video coded. Our findings showed that the leaders and followers identified by cross-recurrence quantification analysis findings matched the leaders and followers identified by the video coding in 70 percent of the dyadic interactions across the collaborating groups. The current findings show that video-based facial emotions recognition as a method can add to collaborative learning research, especially explaining some social, and affective dynamics about it. The study further discusses the possible variables that might confound the relationship between emotional mimicry and leader-follower interactions during collaboration.