Abstract
Understanding how information about threats in the environment is shared and transmitted between individuals is crucial for explaining adaptive, survival-related behaviour in humans and other animals, and for developing treatments for phobias and other anxiety disorders. Research across species has shown that observing a conspecific’s, a ‘demonstrator’s,’ threat responses causes strong and persistent threat memories in the ‘observer’. Here, we examined if physiological synchrony between demonstrator and observer can serve to predict the strength of observationally acquired conditioned responses. We measured synchrony between demonstrators’ and observers’ phasic electrodermal signals during learning, which directly reflects autonomic nervous system activity. Prior interpersonal synchrony predicted the strength of the observer’s later skin conductance responses to threat predicting stimuli, in the absence of the demonstrator. Dynamic coupling between an observer’s and a demonstrator’s autonomic nervous system activity may reflect experience sharing processes facilitating the formation of observational threat associations.
Highlights
Understanding how information about threats in the environment is shared and transmitted between individuals is crucial for explaining adaptive, survival-related behaviour in humans and other animals, and for developing treatments for phobias and other anxiety disorders
The results demonstrate that the predictive effect of the cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) metrics on threat responses does not arise between pseudo-dyads and is specific to actual demonstrator–observer pairings
We investigated if spontaneous synchrony between an observer’s and a demonstrator’s arousal states during observational threat learning predicted the strength of the observer’s conditioned responses in a later testing phase
Summary
Considerable evidence for the role of synchrony in a diverse set of intra- and interpersonal processes, its role, if any, in social learning is not understood. To allow for the assessment of socially acquired threat responses in the absence of direct personal experience of the CS− outcome contingency, no shocks were administered to the observer following CS+ presentations during the testing phase, except following the final presentation (see Methods). Both participants’ electrodermal activity was continuously recorded throughout the experiment allowing for synchrony to be calculated during the learning phase. Threat learning was measured as CS differentiation—stronger skin conductance responses to CS+ compared to CS− images in the testing phase
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