How Moderate Alcohol Consumption Impacts Married or Cohabiting Couples in Expressing Disagreements: An Automatic Computation Model and Analysis

Alcohol consumption is common in married/cohabiting couples, and many studies have attempted to understand its effects on their behavior patterns. Traditionally, those evaluations have been done through questionnaires and self-reports. While these approaches have unique contributions, they cannot track instantaneous behavioral changes, such as when a person shows disagreement, and are subjective to personal bias. Hence, we developed a computation model to automatically and objectively quantify instantaneous non-verbal disagreement expressed by head shakings and the corresponding following behavior. We conducted a preliminary analysis based on data from a randomized controlled experiment, where married/cohabiting couples discussed conflicts in different alcohol consumption conditions. Results showed that participants demonstrated different behavioral patterns in expressing moderate and strong disagreement. In addition, alcohol influenced males' head-shaking magnitude and females' following behavior more than their partners'. The proposed method is general and can be extended to investigate other behavioral cues.