Synchrony and sympathy: Social entrainment with music compared to a metronome.

Abstract

We synchronize movements with other individuals in our everyday life (e.g., when shaking hands), in sports (e.g., rowing), or on dancefloors. Especially this last kind of social entrainment can lead to states of pleasure and ecstasy. In some situations, we even unintentionally mirror another person's gestures or movements, for example, when we are walking with another person and the phase of our steps becomes aligned with the other person's steps. Depending on the relationship we have with this person, such a situation can be awkward or pleasant. All of these examples show that movement synchronization and social bonding are tightly linked. In the current study, we examined affiliation and pro-social behavior following a synchronous or asynchronous interpersonal tapping task with music or a metronome.Interpersonal Coordination and MusicInterpersonal coordination-be it behavior matching, such as mimicry, or interactional synchrony, such as simultaneous rhythmic movements (Bernieri & Rosenthal, 1991)-is a fundamental way to form socioemotional connections. Behavioral mimicry describes the mirroring of another person's gestures, postures, or other movements (e.g., speech gestures, foot shaking; for a review, see Chartrand & Lakin, 2013). Factors that increase the tendency to mimic the behavior of another person include pro-social attitudes (Leighton, Bird, Orsini, & Heyes, 2010), being in a good mood (Likowski et al., 2011), and the likability (Stel et al., 2010) or the goal to get along with this person (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003). In turn, being mimicked can positively affect feelings of liking toward the mimicker (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), feelings of interpersonal closeness (Ashton-James, van Baaren, Chartrand, Decety, & Karremans, 2007), and pro-social behavior in adults (van Baaren, Holland, Kawakami, & van Knippenberg, 2004) and infants (Carpenter, Uebel, & Tomasello, 2013).In contrast to behavioral mimicry that usually includes a time lag of a few seconds, interactional synchrony describes movements that are temporally matched. The social entrainment model of McGrath and Kelly (1986, as cited in Clayton, Sager, & Will, 2004, p. 10) makes the assumption that many human behaviors are oscillatory or rhythmical. The model proposes that the oscillations or rhythms are created endogenously, that the endogenous oscillations or rhythms can become aligned in phase and frequency within an individual and between individuals, and that the temporal patterns of an individual or a group of individuals can become entrained to an external timekeeper. A variety of research suggests that the interpersonal synchronization of movements, such as walking, pendulum-swinging, chair-rocking, body-swaying, or finger-tapping, promotes affiliation and pro-social orientation (Demos, Chaffin, Begosh, Daniels, & Marsh, 2012; Hove & Risen, 2009; Marsh, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009; Reddish, Fischer, & Bulbulia, 2013; Valdesolo & Desteno, 2011; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). By using a moving visual timekeeper, Hove and Risen (2009) showed that the degree of synchrony between the participants' and the experimenters' finger-taps was positively related to how much participants liked the experimenter. Such effects may even be stronger when moving together while listening to music: When rocking in a chair with a partner, the degree of synchronization with music is positively correlated with the feeling of interpersonal connectedness (Demos et al., 2012).Listening to music has a strong emotional component and, similarly to social bonding, engages the endogenous opioid system (Tarr, Launay, & Dunbar, 2014). Related to this, Tarr, Launay, and Dunbar (2016) showed that pain thresholds increased after synchronously dancing (i.e., identical movements while listening to the same music) in groups of four. The authors link this effect to the release of endorphins. In contrast, partial synchrony (i. …