Abstract
The social benefits of interpersonal synchrony are widely recognized. Yet, little is known about its impact on the self. According to enactive cognitive science, the human self for its stability and regulation needs to balance social attunement with disengagement from others. Too much interpersonal synchrony is considered detrimental for a person’s ability to self-regulate. In this study, 66 adults took part in the Body-Conversation Task (BCT), a dyadic movement task promoting spontaneous social interaction. Using whole-body behavioural imaging, we investigated the simultaneous impact of interpersonal synchrony (between persons) and intrapersonal synchrony (within a person) on positive affect and self-regulation of affect. We hypothesized that interpersonal synchrony’s known tendency to increase positive affect would have a trade-off, decreasing a person’s ability to self-regulate affect. Interpersonal synchrony predicted an increase in positive affect. Consistent with our hypothesis, it simultaneously predicted a weakening in self-regulation of affect. Intrapersonal synchrony, however, tended to oppose these effects. Our findings challenge the widespread belief that harmony with others has only beneficial effects, pointing to the need to better understand the impact of interaction dynamics on the stability and regulation of the human self.
Highlights
Humans are no islands, but interconnected social beings
An important question still remains: what is the impact of interpersonal synchrony on the self? In this study we draw on a recent hypothesis in enactive cognitive science, according to which the stability of the self vitally relies on a balance between attunement with others, and the need for independence from them[10,11]
We focused on psychological forms of individual self-organization and asked: how do social dynamics of interpersonal synchrony affect psychological processes of self-regulation? Importantly in addressing this question we took into account behavioural processes of individual self-organization, measured as movement synchrony among the individual’s limb segments
Summary
But interconnected social beings. We continuously engage in social interactions and are affected by them in return. The relation between agent and world is described in terms of non-linear interactive dynamics, whereby agent and environment are mutually constrained by each other[13,14] On this dynamical view, the boundary of the agent is not given, but continuously “enacted” (i.e. brought forth) through a process of self-organization, in which the agent actively structures the exchanges with the environment and thereby generates and maintains a form of systemic stability[12]. When several agents interact they can co-create new higher order forms of social self-organization, with properties irreducible to the participating individuals[19,20,21] We see this in the spontaneous coordination of body movement[18,22], for instance when two persons unintendedly synchronize their rocking chairs[23], or in the interpersonal dynamics of joint dance and music improvisation[24]. Technological and methodological advances have introduced more complex and multivariate measurement of movement, which allow the simultaneous study of intra-bodily and inter-bodily self-organization dynamics (see e.g.37–39)
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