Real video chat.
Real video chat.
"Maintaining a long-distance relationship with video chat - Part 1"
Overview
Long distance relationships are common for many couples, and in further education even more so with around 75% of American students having been in a long-distance relationship (LDR) [21].
Ubiquity of mobile devices and communications apps help manage relationships, with instant messaging, social networking, voice call and video chat platforms interleaved to provide multiple contacts points throughout a day, even when there is a large time difference between the couple [1]. The variety and richness of these apps mean that, irrespective of the time or bandwidth available, some form of real-time or asynchronous communication can be facilitated at any time of day.
Our group looked at the use of video chat to maintain long distance relationships, as it affords a greater sense of shared presence and can create a sense of presence [2] [15]. The regularity of video chats has also increased. What began as an irregular and scheduled novelty turned into more regular and more spontaneous chats, and finally became video calls that last hours where partners basically just “hang out” on near always-on connections [13] [15] [16].
Despite all of this, some affective needs of users are not being met, and some are being affected increasingly negatively. We look at video chat among a group of college students and suggests some areas where the positive affectation of users may be improved.
Affective States
The rich communication medium of video chat has been shown to have measurable effects on affective states, both positively — such as easing loneliness, and increasing the feeling of closeness — and negatively: causing frustration, for instance, about the couple’s inability to touch each other, or with lack of attention [1] [14].
From previous research, there are some specific affective needs that we can expect [9] [22]. During a video chat there are positive expectations and affects, including wanting to feel that it was eagerly anticipated; hopes for a positive conversation that reflects the happy and contented state of the relationship, reciprocated expressions of love; and a feeling that their partner is interested in their stories.
On the contrary, participants in video chats may have to deal with negative emotions, including sadness at being apart; fear of drifting apart causing anxiety; and general difficulties with work or study causing them to feel depressed.
We will look will look at two specific affective states that seem to lend themselves to video chats:
Contentment
Contentment is positive heuristic emotion, the feeling of satisfaction when needs are being fulfilled. According to the Affective Processing Principle affect is evaluated based on “whatever is mentally accessible at the time” [6] [7]. Irrespective of a happy and satisfying relationship up to that point, contentment can drop based on something negative that happens in the moment.
With infrequent communication and the inability to have physical contact, a person in an LDR may be high in anxiety with partners fearing that their loved-one will drift away from them. As video chat may be infrequent and doesn’t facilitate physical contact, its present form is not ideal for dealing with such anxieties.
The cornerstone for many LDRs is “relationship maintenance”, which includes being positive and avoiding conflict, expressing love, affirmations that the relationship is going well, and sharing responsibilities and tasks [20] [22]. As these are mainly verbal and can be enhanced by visual cues such as prolonged eye-contact, smiling, and being presentable for each other, this is something that video chat can do well.
Anticipatory Enthusiasm
Anticipatory enthusiasm is a positive heuristic emotion, that leads people to feel “wanting”, and leads the desire to acquire or receive a reward [11].
As video chats often have to be pre-planned, particularly due to time differences, anticipatory enthusiasm is a given. Anticipation can be highly aroused over multiple time frames – excitement for a video chat at the weekend, the next day, within an hour, in the next few minutes. The arousal can be so high that it can have a physical effect on the body raising heart rate, and causing the face to flush [3]. If that anticipation is not met, high valence affects can be caused, such as sadness, disappointment, distress and annoyance.
Group Project
With mobile devices and communication apps changing rapidly, and work on this subject sparse, we looked at how UCL students in LDRs were using video chat to maintain their relationships, using the study of affective states to measure the effectiveness of solutions to meet their emotional needs.
We recruited regular video chat users and used a mixed methods approach to data gathering, including using autoethnographic diaries, questionnaires, observation and semi- structured interviews.
Auto-Ethnographic Diary
We started with three members of our group and their partners keeping diaries over a period of two weeks. They were three female Chinese students, two with boyfriends in China, and one in another city. This form of self-observation is known as autoethnography and it is a form of self-observation, with the researcher as the participant, and is seen as useful for piloting user studies [12]. The diaries helped gather some initial insights into how young students maintain LDRs and what part video chat plays in that, and these insights informed the subsequent questionnaire.
The strength of this research was that the participants were in relationships of different lengths and degrees of stability; and two of the three were in very long-distance relationships with visits only two or three time a year, and one close enough for occasional weekend visits, so they were addressing challenges at different levels. All of the students were highly technically literate, so we were confident that they were using the latest and best video chat services available to make the research current. The weaknesses were that the number of participants was low and in the same cultural group, so it is difficult to extrapolate generalisations from the data.
We found some common themes, some consistent with recent research:
Synchronous and asynchronous communication levels are very high. Instant responses aren’t always expected because of the time difference, but regular contact is. So, as well as frequent contact point through the day, partners can expect multiple messages to have stacked up through the night. This reduces anxiety, particularly in the morning, as it indicates their partner is regularly thinking about them.
Communication is interleaved over multiple specialised applications based on what is the most efficient to communicate a particular message – something brief, something longer form, something media rich.
Video chats can be more than once a day, can last for more than an hour, and are often more akin to “hanging out”, than face-to-face conversing. This shift is a recent phenomenon, likely linked to ubiquity of devices, available Wi-Fi, and quality of picture and sound [13]. These long video chats can mimic the closeness of living together but can feel repetitive and lead to running out of things to say. This becomes counter-productive and silent pauses cause fear that the relationship is failing.
Finally, video chats have a small window where each user can see how they look, as well as their partner. Some people put themselves in the main window, so they can ensure they are looking good for their partner. Fear of not doing so is high among everyone, so this encouragement of self-scrutiny is unhelpful.
Questionnaire
A questionnaire was shared on Facebook and Chinese instant messaging app QQ and gathered 171 responses. The questionnaire tested if the insights into LDRs and video chat from the diaries were generally applicable. Details of the questionnaires can be seen in the Appendices.
A main insight is that over a third of the video calls lasted more than an hour, over a quarter between 30 minutes and an hour, and over a quarter between 10 and 30 minutes. Yet, two thirds of the respondents agreed or agreed strongly that having enough to talk about was a concern. This seems to point to the current format for video chats not being conducive to delivering the emotional outcome users are hoping for.
The strength of the questionnaire is the number of respondents across a range of ages groups. The weakness is that two-thirds are female and are overwhelmingly Chinese, thus prone to specific cultural biases.
Observation of Video Chats
To better understand what kind of audio-visual experience a video chat can deliver, and to see how people comport themselves, we recorded the video chats of three couples in their own homes. The couples were asked to keep the conversations as normal as possible, with no pre-planning or limitations placed on them. From the interviews we created transcripts, and coded them for positive and negative emotional states and themes to compare and identify patterns of commonality [8].
The strength of observing video chat recorded in its natural environment lies in hearing the participants entire conversation in their own words rather than paraphrased in a post-video chat interview. The weakness is that participants are likely to be more reserved, less intimate, and withholding their real emotions.
The coding of the three interviews revealed a mix of positive negative emotional states. Common were anxieties about focussing on each other and not being distracted, long pauses, and running out of things to say.
One incident summed up all of these anxieties. One of the participants maintained strong eye contact throughout the video chat, whilst the other was distracted by watching television: his eye contact was therefore greatly reduced, and there were long pauses. The issue was never directly addressed, but comments such as “what are you watching” made the other participant aware their lack of focus was noticed. Along with other factors, this caused the video chat to end with one participant seemingly upset.
Semi-Structured Interviews
During some video chats we believed that participants may have been masking feelings from their partner. In the previously mentioned video a participant appeared to be crying but hid her face, despite verbally denying this to her partner. To gain a better understanding of our participants emotional states, we conducted semi-structured interviews and took a micro-phenomenological approach to interviewing them [17]. During the interviews we used the Geneva Wheel, a theoretically-derived and empirically-tested instrument thatmeasures the emotional reactions and strength of particular aspects of the video chat [19].
In general, we noticed that people tended to report at the higher ends of the scales. This is interesting as in Likert-style scales the tendency is to score near the middle [4]. Although joy and contentment scored high, so did sadness and disappointment – people seemed to swing between extremes. The participant who was crying rated anger and disappointment at their highest levels. Her contentment valence was high, and despite their relationship being several years old, the lack of eye contact and attention led to her revealing that it made her question the stability of the entire relationship. In an instance with another participant, when seeing her dog in the video chat, joy and love were scored at the extremes, but she also revealed sadness that she couldn’t hug and smell it.
The Geneva Wheel is simple to use. Particularly when having to speak about negative feelings, it is easier and less embarrassing for a participant to simply point to a diagram. A problem is that it has a restricted set of options, so the results may lack the richness of freely describing emotions.
Conclusion
From the diaries, questionnaires, videos and interviews, there are three key insights that could inform enhancements to video chat systems, improving it as a tool for people in long distance relationships:
1. Video chats are often stationary and in one location. Privacy in shared households may be an issue, but the form-factor of the devices doesn’t lend itself to being moved around [15].
2. Eye contact is very important, and the lack of it a frequent cause of upset. However, the close-up face-to face conversations that enable strong eye contact may be confrontational, or cause frustration.
3. Frequency and length of video calls are increasing over time, yet people worry about not having enough to talk about.
References
1. APN Aguila. 2011. Living Long-Distance Relationships through Computer-Mediated Communication. Social Science Diliman, December 2009: 83–106. Retrieved from http://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/socialsciencediliman/article/viewArticle/2045
2. Morgan G. Ames, Janet Go, Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, and Mirjana Spasojevic. 2010. Making love in the network closet. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW ’10: 145. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718946
3. Ali Azarbarzin, Michele Ostrowski, Patrick Hanly, and Magdy Younes. 2014. Relationship between Arousal Intensity and Heart Rate Response to Arousal. Sleep 37, 4: 645–653. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.3560
4. Phillip A Bishop and Robert L Herron. 2015. Use and Misuse of the Likert Item Responses and Other Ordinal Measures. International journal of exercise science 8, 3: 297–302. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27182418%5Cnhttp://www.pubmedcentral.ni h.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=PMC4833473
5. Eveline Chao. 2017. How WeChat Became China’s App For Everything. Fast Company website. Retrieved May 4, 2018 from https://www.fastcompany.com/3065255/china- wechat-tencent-red-envelopes-and-social-money
6. Gerald L. Clore and Jeffrey R. Huntsinger. 2009. How the Object of Affect Guides its Impact. Emotion Review 1, 1: 58–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073908097188
7. Gerald L. Clore, Alexander J. Schiller, and Adi Shaked. 2018. Affect and cognition: three principles. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 19: 78–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.11.010
8. Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2014. Basics of Qualitative Research. Sage.
9. Marianne Dainton and Brooks Aylor. 2002. Patterns of communication channel use in the maintenance of long-distance relationships. Communication Research Reports 19, 2: 118–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824090209384839
10. Paul Ekman and Erika L Rosenberg. 2005. What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195179644.001.0001
11. Vladas Griskevicius, Michelle N. Shiota, and Samantha L. Neufeld. 2010. Influence of Different Positive Emotions on Persuasion Processing: A Functional Evolutionary Approach. Emotion 10, 2: 190–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018421
12. J Hughes, V King, T Rodden, and H Anderson. 1995. The Role of Ethnography in Interactive Systems Design. Interactions: 57–65.
13. Rebecca Johnson. 2016. Finding meaning through video chat communication in long- distance romantic relationships.
14. David S. Kirk, Abigail Sellen, and Xiang Cao. 2010. Home video communication: mediating “closeness.” Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW ’10: 135. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718945
15. Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg. 2012. Intimacy in long-distance relationships over video chat. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’12: 753. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207785
16. Carman Neustaedter, Carolyn Pang, Azadeh Forghani, Erick Oduor, Serena Hillman, Tejinder K. Judge, Michael Massimi, and Saul Greenberg. 2015. Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22, 1: 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/2696869
17. Claire Petitmengin. 2006. Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5, 3–4: 229–269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9022-2
18. Monica A. Riordan. 2017. Emojis as Tools for Emotion Work: Communicating Affect in Text Messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36, 5: 549–567. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X17704238
19. Klaus R. Scherer. 2005. What are emotions? and how can they be measured? Social Science Information 44, 4: 695–729. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018405058216
20. Laura Stafford. 1994. Maintaining Relationships through Strategic and Routine Interaction.
21. Laura Stafford. 2004. Maintaining long-distance and cross-residential relationships.Maintaining Long-Distance and Cross-Residential Relationships 56, 2006: 1–150. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410611512
22. Laura Stafford and Daniel J Canary. 1991. Maintenance strategies and romantic relationship type, gender and relational characteristics. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 8: 217–242.
Appendix - Questionnaire Summary
• Two thirds of the respondents were 21-25, a sixth of them 26 to 30.
• Two thirds were female, one third male.
• A quarter had been together for three to five years, and the rest equally less than six months, six months to one year, one to two years, two to three years, and five years of more.
• One third met up to once every three months, a third met up between one every three and six months, and a third less than every six months.
• A half had no time difference, but a quarter had between six and nine hours’ time difference between them.
• Call frequency was equally a quarter more than once a day, a quarter once a day, a quarter several times a week, and a quarter less than once a week.
• Over a third of the video calls lasted more than an hour, over a quarter between 10 and 30 minutes, and over a quarter between 30 minutes and an hour.
• WeChat had 85% of the video chats, with QQ, Facetime, Skype, Google Hangout and others following.
• Two thirds of video chats originated in the bedroom
• Two thirds of participants reported that the calls origination was equally shared.
• Over half agreed or agreed strongly that eye contact was important.
• Two thirds agreed or agreed strongly that having enough to talk about was a concern
• Three quarters agreed or agreed strongly that getting support was important
• Two thirds agreed or agreed strongly that having their partner initiate the video call would make them feel better
Maintaining a long-distance relationship with video chat - Part 2
Introduction
Using the lens of two specific affective states, anticipatory enthusiasm and contentment, we will look at three insights of our study to suggest possible enhancements to video chat.
Problems and Design Suggestions
Video chats are mainly in one location.
When initiating a video chat, a user wants to believe that their call is welcomed – this isanticipatory enthusiasm. If video chats are confined to one single location, the interruption of whatever that person is doing may be unwelcome. However, if the technology allowed the caller join in an activity it might better received.
Neustaedter et al. concluded that devices used for video chat don’t lend themselves to being moved around, particularly into places where they might get wet or dirty [5]. One of our participants reported that her video chats were in a fixed location as her phone battery ran out quickly, so she needed mains power. Furthermore the form factor of metal and glass suggests formality and work, and their cost and fragility may confine them to the safety of desks and tables [7].
A solution could be to create an accessory encouraging the user to carry their device around their home. This would give partners a greater feeling of “being there” and sharing a life together, rather than just being a visitor [1]. Made of a protective material like splash-proof silicone, and with a small footprint, it would be ideal for placing on a kitchen worktop, a dining table, or even a bathroom. As anthropomorphism is known to encourage interaction it could have an anthropomorphic shape, with bendable arms and legs, [3]. Bendable legs would allow the device to be positioned giving the best view of the room, or their partner’s face. It would also have additional battery power enabling prolonged calls.
Video chats are face-to-face.
A face-to-face stance my result in an extreme valence, and a high state of arousal. A person within a few inches of another person’s face may appear confrontational, which could trigger a visceral, angry reaction. If the couple are arguing, the highly confrontational stance could raise their emotional state to an even higher valance and arousal state, not ideal when contentment is the aim of a video chat. If they are being very intimate it could cause frustration that they are close enough to touch, but can’t [7].
In two of our student interviews a preference was expressed for the larger, life-size image of their partner’s face that a tablet affords. Mobile devices have wide-angled lenses, so the user’s face needs to be close to the phone. As the quality of cameras are now very high, and face-tracking software common, an adaptation of the video chat software could allow the user to hold the camera further away from their face and the software digitally zoom in to the face to fill the screen. This could mitigate the need for the users to be nose-to-nose.
Giving the accessory a sucker cup and an articulated arm attachment would enable the device to be affixed to cupboard doors, windows, mirrors etc and be positioned at a convenient level for conversation and for the partners to see what each other is doing, be it working, cooking, or exercising, with their hands free.
For many the desire is there to “be present” in the same space [5]. With mobile phones having front and back cameras, giving the embodied user the ability to control what camera they are looking through would increase the sense of presence in the space with their partner, bringing them closer together. Combined with a 360 degree video camera attachment and a VR headset, the whole experience could approach “telepresence”, a concept popularised by Marvin Minsky in 1980, in which a user feels that they inhabit another space [4].
During long video chats, there is a fear of running out of things to say.
In a video chat, each partner wants to feel contented and be reassured that their relationship is on-track. Anxiousness, due to fear of running out of things to say, led to several high valances noted in the theme coding of our transcripts. The affects ranged from anger at a partner for not speaking, sadness that the conversation had stopped, frustration that a partner was distracted by doing something else, and concern that they were drifting apart.
Relationship maintenance theory has been used in several studies with people using video chat in LDRs. Stafford writes of people engaging in “actions and activities” to maintain relationships [8]. Neustaedter and Greenberg developed this into “parallel activities” and “shared activities”[5]. With parallel activities, each partner is engaging in their own activity during the video chat: cooking a meal, doing some gardening etc. With shared activities, both partners are engaging in similar activities that replicate what they may have been doing if they were together, such as eating a meal, watching a television programme, or playing a video game. In both cases they feel less anxiety about thinking of the next topic of conversation, and they may be less likely obsessively look at the small image of themselves, worried about what they look like to their partner. By sharing “desired relational definitions” both parties are reassured that their relationship is stable as they are being reminded of why they are together, because of their shared interests, values and tastes [2] [5] [8].
Conclusion
Despite achievements in engineering and software design greatly improving video and audio quality, there has been little regard paid to the emotional needs of users, and some of the negative affects of video chats have even been amplified. By moving away from face-to-face conversation to “hanging out” together some of the negative affects may be mitigated [6].
Making a device accessory that encourages moving around, rather than being in a fixed position, would encourage users to interact with their partners in shared and parallel activities, giving them a greater sense of presence in each other’s lives leading to a more satisfying interaction for both partners [2] [6].
References
1. Morgan G. Ames, Janet Go, Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, and Mirjana Spasojevic. 2010. Making love in the network closet. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW ’10: 145. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718946
2. U Baishya and C Neustaedter. 2017. In your eyes: Anytime, anywhere video and audio streaming for couples. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW: 84–97. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998200
3. A. Bruce, I. Nourbakhsh, and R. Simmons. The role of expressiveness and attention in human-robot interaction. Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292) 4: 4138–4142. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.2002.1014396
4. Marvin Minsky. 2010. Telepresence. Omni. Retrieved from https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html
5. Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg. 2012. Intimacy in long-distance relationships over video chat. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’12: 753. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207785
6. Carman Neustaedter, Carolyn Pang, Azadeh Forghani, Erick Oduor, Serena Hillman, Tejinder K. Judge, Michael Massimi, and Saul Greenberg. 2015. Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22, 1: 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/2696869
7. Don Norman. 2007. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Hachette.
8. Laura Stafford. 1994. Maintaining Relationships through Strategic and Routine Interaction.