Abstract
Previous research highlighted that during social interactions people shape each other's emotional states by resonance mechanisms and synchronized autonomic patterns. Starting from the idea that joint actions create shared emotional experiences, in the present study a social bond was experimentally induced by making subjects cooperate with each other. Participants' autonomic system activity (electrodermal: skin conductance level and response: SCL, SCR; cardiovascular indices: heart rate: HR) was continuously monitored during an attentional couple game. The cooperative motivation was induced by presenting feedback which reinforced the positive outcomes of the intersubjective exchange. 24 participants coupled in 12 dyads were recruited. Intrasubject analyses revealed higher HR in the first part of the task, connoted by increased cognitive demand and arousing social dynamic, while intersubject analysis showed increased synchrony in electrodermal activity after the feedback. Such results encourage the use of hyperscanning techniques to assess emotional coupling in ecological and real-time paradigms.
Highlights
The capacity to bond with other people has been associated with a series of positive effects for human beings, such as greater self-satisfaction [1, 2] and mental and physical well-being, including, for example, resiliency, reducing personal distress [3,4,5,6]
Such indices were successively entered as dependent variables into different ANOVA tests, one for each autonomic measure with independent factor feedback and block, to assess differences in synchrony strength across the experimental conditions
The present results permitted exploring autonomic coupling in dyads of subjects creating a social bond in real-time by cooperating in an attentional task presented as a couple game
Summary
The capacity to bond with other people has been associated with a series of positive effects for human beings, such as greater self-satisfaction [1, 2] and mental and physical well-being, including, for example, resiliency, reducing personal distress [3,4,5,6]. The creation of such positive relationships is thought to rely upon a bidirectional bond of affective and behavioral responses between two or more individuals [7, 8]. Recent research proposed that, during social exchange, such synchronization can occur in the form of an alignment of behavior [14, 15] and posture [16] as well as neurophysiological [17, 18] and psychophysiological measures [19,20,21,22,23].
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