The Effects of Interrupting Behavior on Interpersonal Attitude and Engagement in Dyadic Interactions

Interruptions frequently occur in dyadic human interaction. In addition to serve as turn-taking mechanism, they may lead to different perceptions of both the interruptee and interrupter's interpersonal attitude, engagement and involvement. We present an empirical study to investigate whether different interruption types (i.e. amount of overlap between speakers and utterance completeness) and strategies (disruptive vs. cooperative) in agent-agent interaction have an impact on perceived agents' interpersonal attitude, engagement and involvement. We found that the interruption type has more influence on the perceived attitudes of both agents, whereas by using a cooperative strategy (as opposed to a disruptive one) an interrupter is perceived as more engaged and more involved in the interaction.