Nonverbal communications involving physical contact convey “Kansei” information that is difficult to express in verbal communications. In this study, we proposed a method to investigate “Kansei” information in nonverbal communications, and surveyed how people perceive nonverbal communication involving physical contact. In the psychological experiment using questionnaire, we presented various words describing tapping and patting actions with Japanese onomatopoeias and sound symbolic words expressing a concept or nuance that is difficult to verbalize explicitly. Participants first imaged the situation wherein they made communication with another person through the physical contact, and then evaluated the “Kansei” information of communications and rated them by adjectives. We found that onomatopoeias added a variety of impressions to communications with physical contact. We then applied factor analysis using adjective rating to extract a factor space of the communicative actions. For both tapping and patting motion, the first factor represented atmosphere of the behavior, and the second dimension represented activeness of the physical motions themselves. We then mapped the rating scores of desirability of the communication onto the factor spaces. The scores of the first and the second factors well predict in an additive way the desirability of communication for both actions, and the influence of the first factor was stronger than that of the second factor. These results suggest that the structure of factor space represents desirability of the communication regardless of actions. The proposed method may be useful and efficient to investigate the Kansei information, factor space, and their inter-relation, of nonverbal communications.
