Real-life Social Interactions Research Articles

A Study on How Social Media FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Impacts the Gen Z Audience

Generation Z, or Gen Z, refers to people born between 1995 and 2010, often known as "zoomers," the first generation to fully embrace the internet. This paper focuses on the impact of socialmedia-induced Fear ofMissing Out (FOMO) on Generation Z, blending with the characteristics of digital nativity and extensive engagement with social media platforms. Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO, was uniquely introduced in 2004 with the rise of social networking sites. It centers on anxiety and how, for Gen Z, this plays a pivotal role in making one feel absent from rewarding experiences. This study delves into the effects on mental health, psychological well-being, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. It explores social media analytics regarding usage, compulsive checking, behavioural consequences, following trends, and real-life social interactions. The findings highlight the need for strategies to mitigate FOMO's adverse effects, promoting healthier social media habits and fostering a more balanced approach to digital consumption.

The oxytocinergic system and racial ingroup bias in empathic neural activity

Studies have indicated that the human brain exhibits a more robust neural empathic response towards individuals of the same racial ingroup than those of the outgroup. However, the impact of the oxytocinergic system on the dynamic connectivity between brain regions involved in racial ingroup bias in empathy (RIBE) and its implications for real-life social interaction intention remains unclear. To address this gap, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate RIBE-modulated neural activities and the influence of the oxytocinergic system at both neural and behavioral levels. Participants homozygous for the A/A and G/G genotypes of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) rs53576 polymorphism underwent scanning while making judgments about painful versus non-painful stimuli in same-race versus other-race scenarios following either oxytocin (OT) or placebo treatment. The results revealed greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insula (AI) in response to same-race compared to other-race models in the G/G group but not in the A/A group. RIBE also modulated the connections between bilateral AI and the ACC, and the effect of OT on this modulatory effect was moderated by genotype rs53576 and interpersonal trust. Moreover, more extensive changes in AI-ACC connections were associated with higher levels of revenge intention in the low interpersonal trust group. Overall, our findings suggest a pivotal role of the oxytocinergic system in the RIBE-modulated neural activities and revenge intention in human interactions with the modulatory effect of interpersonal trust.This article is part of the Special Issue on “Empathic Pain”.

A laughing matter? Managing hearing difficulties in real life everyday social interactions with adults with hearing loss

Objective This study examines the interactional management of hearing difficulties and hearing aids (HAs) in real-life, video-recorded social interactions with adults with hearing loss (HL) and their families/friends. Design 32 video-recordings in various social settings were analysed using Conversation Analysis. Study sample 20 adults with HL and their families/friends. Results HL and/or HAs did not typically become explicit in conversation. When adults with HL’ hearing difficulties did become explicit in the conversation, they were typically accompanied by laughter/humour. Sometimes the humour/laughter was initiated by the person with HL themselves (i.e. self-directed joking) but more frequently it was initiated by someone else within the conversation (i.e. a tease). Conclusions The findings display the management of the “to tell or not to tell” dilemma in practice, and how humour was often used to lighten the tension when “telling” about HL and/or HAs. The findings also highlight that not all humour is equal: there are different outcomes for adults with HL depending on who initiated the humour/laughter within the context of the interaction. This study highlights stigma-in-action – how stigma related to HL and/or HAs is occasioned and managed within real-life social interactions.

Nomophobia and Self-Esteem: A Study of Migrant Students' Psychological Well-Being

The transition from high school to higher education represents a significant milestone for adolescents, often accompanied by migration to access better educational opportunities, known as "merantau." This phenomenon, prevalent among students aged 18-24, is associated with a high prevalence of nomophobia, characterized by anxiety and discomfort when separated from smartphones. This study aims to explore the relationship between self-esteem and nomophobia tendencies among migrant students, given the mixed findings in existing literature. Employing a correlational quantitative research design, data were collected from 153 migrant students using the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) and the State Self-Esteem Scale (SSES). Descriptive analysis revealed that 74.5% of students exhibited moderate nomophobia tendencies, while 62.7% had high self-esteem. Pearson's correlation analysis indicated a significant negative relationship between self-esteem and nomophobia tendencies (r = -0.222, p = 0.006), suggesting that higher self-esteem is associated with lower nomophobia tendencies. This finding underscores the importance of enhancing self-esteem to mitigate nomophobia, highlighting the role of positive self-perception and real-life social interactions. Despite limitations such as the online data collection method, this study provides valuable insights into the psychological dynamics between self-esteem and nomophobia among migrant students, advocating for targeted interventions to address these issues.

Neural Hyperresponsivity During the Anticipation of Tangible Social and Nonsocial Rewards in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Concurrent Neuroimaging and Facial Electromyography Study

BackgroundAtypical anticipation of social reward has been shown to lie at the core of the social challenges faced by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, previous research has yielded inconsistent results and has often overlooked crucial characteristics of stimuli. Here, we investigated ASD reward processing using social and nonsocial tangible stimuli, carefully matched on several key dimensions. MethodsWe examined the anticipation and consumption of social (interpersonal touch) and nonsocial (flavored milk) rewards in 25 high-functioning individuals with ASD and 25 neurotypical adult individuals. In addition to subjective ratings of wanting and liking, we measured physical energetic expenditure to obtain the rewards, brain activity with neuroimaging, and facial reactions through electromyography on a trial-by-trial basis. ResultsParticipants with ASD did not exhibit reduced motivation for social or nonsocial rewards; their subjective ratings, motivated efforts, and facial reactions were comparable to those of neurotypical participants. However, anticipation of higher-value rewards increased neural activation in lateral parietal cortices, sensorimotor regions, and the orbitofrontal cortex. Moreover, participants with ASD exhibited hyperconnectivity between frontal medial regions and occipital regions and the thalamus. ConclusionsIndividuals with ASD who experienced rewards with tangible characteristics, whether social or nonsocial, displayed typical subjective and objective motivational and hedonic responses. Notably, the observed hyperactivations in sensory and attentional nodes during anticipation suggest atypical sensory overprocessing of forthcoming rewards rather than decreased reward value. While these atypicalities may not have manifested in observable behavior here, they could impact real-life social interactions that require nuanced predictions, potentially leading to the misperception of reduced interest in rewarding social stimuli in ASD.

Dual routes of chunking social interaction: Insights from grouping two agent actions in working memory.

Humans have evolved the sophisticated ability to extract social relations embedded in interactive entities. One typical demonstration is a social chunking phenomenon wherein the cognitive system chunks individual actions into a unified episode basing on perceived interactive actions. However, the mechanisms underlying social chunking remain to be elucidated. Most studies have adopted static images and manipulated interactions through agents' facingness (face-to-face vs. back-to-back). Connecting agents via directed contingent actions is crucial in forming real-life social interaction. Hence, we employed dynamic actions as stimuli, separated physical- and communicative-contingency interactive actions, and predicted that domain-general physical regularities and domain-specific social relationships are crucial in social interactions, respectively. We tested this prediction by using an involuntary chunking effect in working memory, wherein two individual actions are involuntarily chunked when containing task-irrelevant interactive information. We found that involuntary chunking occurred for both types of upright interactive actions (Experiments 1, 3, 5, and 6). Inverting actions erased the chunking of communicative- but not physical-contingency actions (Experiments 2, 4, and 5). The facingness of dyads did not participate in chunking physical-contingency actions but was a prerequisite for chunking communicative-contingency actions (Experiments 3 and 6). These results reveal the dual routes of chunking interactive actions. Moreover, they suggest that the chunking mechanisms of dynamic social interaction are distinct from those of static images, highlighting the importance of using dynamic stimuli to explore the mechanisms of social interaction in emerging people-watching interdisciplinarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Analysis of the Impact of Racial Discrimination on Real-life Social Interactions

Race has always been one of the core issues focused on throughout the world. With the technological progress and civilization of mankind, people's living standards have improved to a great extent, and civilization has developed to a greater extent, but the problem of racial discrimination in a variety of scenarios has not been eliminated, and in some ways, racial discrimination can have a very profound impact on a country to a company. In some ways, racial discrimination can have a profound effect on a country or a company. In general, in companies where racial discrimination is a minimal problem, there tends to be less conflict and tension among members. Conversely, when prejudice and discrimination are prevalent among individuals within a company, it can lead to the perpetuation of problems such as unfair communication, cooperation and promotion practices. Ultimately, this can have a negative impact on a company's performance and reputation. Therefore, it is crucial to address the issue of racial discrimination. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and mitigate the impact of racial discrimination on our lives and work through collected data and specific case studies.

Recognizing facial expressions of emotion amid noise: A dynamic advantage.

Humans communicate internal states through complex facial movements shaped by biological and evolutionary constraints. Although real-life social interactions are flooded with dynamic signals, current knowledge on facial expression recognition mainly arises from studies using static face images. This experimental bias might stem from previous studies consistently reporting that young adults minimally benefit from the richer dynamic over static information, whereas children, the elderly, and clinical populations very strongly do (Richoz, Jack, Garrod, Schyns, & Caldara, 2015, Richoz, Jack, Garrod, Schyns, & Caldara, 2018b). These observations point to a near-optimal facial expression decoding system in young adults, almost insensitive to the advantage of dynamic over static cues. Surprisingly, no study has yet tested the idea that such evidence might be rooted in a ceiling effect. To this aim, we asked 70 healthy young adults to perform static and dynamic facial expression recognition of the six basic expressions while parametrically and randomly varying the low-level normalized phase and contrast signal (0%-100%) of the faces. As predicted, when 100% face signals were presented, static and dynamic expressions were recognized with equal efficiency with the exception of those with the most informative dynamics (i.e., happiness and surprise). However, when less signal was available, dynamic expressions were all better recognized than their static counterpart (peaking at ∼20%). Our data show that facial movements increase our ability to efficiently identify emotional states of others under the suboptimal visual conditions that can occur in everyday life. Dynamic signals are more effective and sensitive than static ones for decoding all facial expressions of emotion for all human observers.

An investigation of the modulatory effects of empathic and autistic traits on emotional and facial motor responses during live social interactions.

A close relationship between emotional contagion and spontaneous facial mimicry has been theoretically proposed and is supported by empirical data. Facial expressions are essential in terms of both emotional and motor synchrony. Previous studies have demonstrated that trait emotional empathy enhanced spontaneous facial mimicry, but the relationship between autistic traits and spontaneous mimicry remained controversial. Moreover, previous studies presented faces that were static or videotaped, which may lack the "liveliness" of real-life social interactions. We addressed this limitation by using an image relay system to present live performances and pre-recorded videos of smiling or frowning dynamic facial expressions to 94 healthy female participants. We assessed their subjective experiential valence and arousal ratings to infer the amplitude of emotional contagion. We measured the electromyographic activities of the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscles to estimate spontaneous facial mimicry. Individual differences measures included trait emotional empathy (empathic concern) and the autism-spectrum quotient. We did not find that live performances enhanced the modulatory effect of trait differences on emotional contagion or spontaneous facial mimicry. However, we found that a high trait empathic concern was associated with stronger emotional contagion and corrugator mimicry. We found no two-way interaction between the autism spectrum quotient and emotional condition, suggesting that autistic traits did not modulate emotional contagion or spontaneous facial mimicry. Our findings imply that previous findings regarding the relationship between emotional empathy and emotional contagion/spontaneous facial mimicry using videos and photos could be generalized to real-life interactions.

Where do differences in theory of mind development come from? An agent-based model of social interaction and theory of mind

IntroductionWhere do individual differences in theory of mind (ToM) development come from? This is an open-ended issue in developmental psychology. Correlational research suggests social interaction as a cause. However, causal experiments controlling children's extended, real-life social interactions are impractical and unethical, so the links between social interaction and ToM remain only indirectly demonstrated. To shed light on how social interaction, in different degrees and forms, may influence ToM development, we conducted computational experiments using agent-based modeling.MethodsTo begin with, we simulated agents (hypothetically, children) and assigned them to 10 groups, where each group was manipulated to allow a different amount of social interaction, from 1 to 10. Within each group, agents randomly roamed and encountered one another and then interacted. If these interactions continued long enough, agents' ToM probabilistically improved.ResultsAs expected, results showed that the amount of social interaction strongly influenced how fast agents developed ToM, where more social interaction led to more rapid development. Given this confirmation of the assumed link, we more focally explored how other factors—such as having a prior, established social network or agents' network centrality—could influence the social interaction-ToM link. Then, we tested our model against real-world data from 84 deaf children and showed that our modeling results could explain the social interaction-ToM link observed in deaf children.DiscussionThese demonstrations illustrate how individual differences in ToM development may emerge and offer an explanation specifying a crucial mechanism for how all humans achieve ToM—faster or with delay—through processes of social interaction.

The effects of everyday-life social interactions on anxiety-related autonomic responses differ between men and women

Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is difficult to mimic the complexity of real-life social interactions. Consequently, the social modulation of anxiety and related autonomic responses in everyday life remains poorly understood. We used smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) combined with wearable electrocardiogram sensors to investigate how everyday-life social interactions affect state anxiety and related cardiac changes in women and men. On five consecutive days, 96 healthy young participants (53% women) answered up to six EMA surveys per day, indicating characteristics of their most recent social interaction and the respective interaction partner(s). In women, our results showed lower heart rate in the presence of a male interaction partner. Men showed the same effect with female interaction partners. Moreover, only women showed decreased heart rate and increased heart rate variability with increasing interaction partner familiarity. These findings specify the conditions under which social interactions reduce anxiety-related responses in women and men.

Mapping cortical activations underlying covert and overt language production using high-density diffuse optical tomography

Gold standard neuroimaging modalities such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and more recently electrocorticography (ECoG) have provided profound insights regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of language, but they are limited in applications involving naturalistic language production especially in developing brains, during face-to-face dialogues, or as a brain-computer interface. High-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) provides high-fidelity mapping of human brain function with comparable spatial resolution to that of fMRI but in a silent and open scanning environment similar to real-life social scenarios. Therefore, HD-DOT has potential to be used in naturalistic settings where other neuroimaging modalities are limited. While HD-DOT has been previously validated against fMRI for mapping the neural correlates underlying language comprehension and covert (i.e., “silent”) language production, HD-DOT has not yet been established for mapping the cortical responses to overt (i.e., “out loud”) language production. In this study, we assessed the brain regions supporting a simple hierarchy of language tasks: silent reading of single words, covert production of verbs, and overt production of verbs in normal hearing right-handed native English speakers (n = 33). First, we found that HD-DOT brain mapping is resilient to movement associated with overt speaking. Second, we observed that HD-DOT is sensitive to key activations and deactivations in brain function underlying the perception and naturalistic production of language. Specifically, statistically significant results were observed that show recruitment of regions in occipital, temporal, motor, and prefrontal cortices across all three tasks after performing stringent cluster-extent based thresholding. Our findings lay the foundation for future HD-DOT studies of imaging naturalistic language comprehension and production during real-life social interactions and for broader applications such as presurgical language assessment and brain-machine interfaces.

Link between excessive social media use and psychiatric disorders.

Mental health disorders are an emerging challenge with the progressively increasing usage of social media platforms. Social media use is the second leading cause of disability among psychiatric disorders. A great deal of literature has tried to establish links between social media exposure and mental health diseases. However, there is a need to discuss the current literature that presents crucial perspectives on social media-induced psychiatric disorders to establish a holistic, evidence-based approach for their prevention and treatment. The use of social networks is strongly correlated with the development of anxiety and other psychological problems such as depression, insomnia, stress, decreased subjective happiness, and a sense of mental deprivation. The majority of the cited literature predicts that the likelihood of social media-induced mental health problems is directly proportional to the amount of time spent on these sites, the frequency of usage, and the number of platforms being used. Various possible explanations have been implicated, including a negative impact on self-esteem through unhealthy comparisons, social media burnout, stress, lack of emotional regulation due to social media preoccupation, and development of social anxiety due to decreased real-life social interactions. It has been postulated that increased social media use is driven by preexisting anxiety and is a coping strategy. This era of progressively increasing digitalization, the recent trend of a dramatic shift toward online social life, and the desire to get social attention is expected to take a gruesome toll on the population's mental health, which therefore warrants more attention to mental health care.

Momentary assessment of the relations between narcissistic traits, interpersonal behaviors, and aggression.

This study explores the associations among narcissistic traits, interpersonal behaviors, and aggression using repeated, situation-based measurement. We examine narcissism's relations with aggression across three levels of its theorized hierarchy (level 1: narcissism; level 2: grandiose vs. vulnerable narcissism; level 3: antagonism, agentic extraversion, and narcissistic neuroticism). Using an experience-sampling approach, the current study examined the effects of narcissism and its finer-grained components on daily affective experiences and aggressive behaviors in the context of interpersonal interactions. Data were collected from 477 undergraduate students who were instructed to complete four prompts a day for ten consecutive days. Narcissism at the global construct level positively predicted multiple indices of episodic aggression (i.e., aggressive temper, aggressive urge, verbal aggression). At the dual-dimension level, grandiose narcissism specifically predicted aggression, and then at the trifurcated level, interpersonal antagonism predicted aggression by itself and in interaction with event-level negative affect. Negative affect consistently exhibited both within- and between-person effects on aggression. In real-life social interactions, narcissism dimensions differentially affect the way individuals experience social interactions and process negative affect, and thus in both research and clinical practice, narcissism is best assessed as a heterogeneous, multidimensional construct.

The importance of high quality real-life social interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about dramatic restrictions to real-life social interactions and a shift towards more online social encounters. Positive social interactions have been highlighted as an important protective factor, with previous studies suggesting an involvement of the amygdala in the relationship between social embeddedness and well-being. The present study investigated the effect of the quality of real-life and online social interactions on mood, and explored whether this association is affected by an individual’s amygdala activity. Sixty-two participants of a longitudinal study took part in a one-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) during the first lockdown, reporting their momentary well-being and their engagement in real-life and online social interactions eight times per day (N ~ 3000 observations). Amygdala activity was assessed before the pandemic during an emotion-processing task. Mixed models were calculated to estimate the association between social interactions and well-being, including two-way interactions to test for the moderating effect of amygdala activity. We found a positive relationship between real-life interactions and momentary well-being. In contrast, online interactions had no effect on well-being. Moreover, positive real-life social interactions augmented this social affective benefit, especially in individuals with higher amygdala being more sensitive to the interaction quality. Our findings demonstrate a mood-lifting effect of positive real-life social interactions during the pandemic, which was dependent on amygdala activity before the pandemic. As no corresponding effect was found between online social interactions and well-being, it can be concluded that increased online social interactions may not compensate for the absence of real-life social interactions.

3D Social Research: Analysis of Social Interaction Using Computer Vision

Video data offer important insights into social processes because they enable direct observation of real-life social interaction. Though such data have become abundant and increasingly accessible, they pose challenges to scalability and measurement. Computer vision (CV), i.e., software-based automated analysis of visual material, can help address these challenges, but existing CV tools are not sufficiently tailored to analyze social interactions. We describe our novel approach, “3D social research” (3DSR), which uses CV and 3D camera footage to study kinesics and proxemics, two core elements of social interaction. Using eight videos of a scripted interaction and five real-life street scene videos, we demonstrate how 3DSR expands sociologists’ analytical toolkit by facilitating a range of scalable and precise measurements. We specifically emphasize 3DSR's potential for analyzing physical distance, movement in space, and movement rate – important aspects of kinesics and proxemics in interactions. We also assess data reliability when using 3DSR.

Social Inference from Relational Visual Information

Humans easily make social evaluations from visual input, such as recognizing a social interaction or deciding who is a friend and who is a foe. Prior efforts to model this ability have suggested that visual features and motion cues alone cannot account for human performance in social tasks, like distinguishing between helping and hindering interactions. On the other hand, generative Bayesian inference models, which make predictions based on simulations of agents’ social or physical goals, accurately predict human judgments, but are computationally very expensive and often impossible to implement in natural visual stimuli. Inspired by developmental work, we hypothesize that introducing inductive biases in visual models would allow them to make more human-like social judgments. Specifically, in this study, we investigate if relational representations of visual stimuli using graph neural networks can predict human social interaction judgments. We use the PHASE dataset, consisting of 2D animations of two agents and two objects resembling real-life social interactions, rated as friendly, neutral, or adversarial. We propose a graph neural networks (GNN) based architecture, that takes in graph representations of a video and predicts the relationship between the agents. We collected human ratings for each of the 400 videos and found that our GNN model aligns with human judgments significantly better than a baseline visual model with the same visual/motion information but without the graph structure (79% vs 62% prediction of human judgements). Intriguingly, explicitly adding relational information to the baseline model does not improve its performance, suggesting that graphical representations in particular are important to modeling human judgements. Taken together, these results suggest that relational graphical representations of visual information can help artificial vision systems make more human-like social judgments without incurring the computational cost of Bayesian models, and provide insights into the computations that humans employ while making visual social judgments.

Testing the effect of oxytocin on social grooming in bonobos.

Oxytocin has attracted research attention due to its role in promoting social bonding. In bonobos and chimpanzees, the two species most closely related to humans, urinary oxytocin is known to correlate with key behaviours related to social bonding such as social grooming in chimpanzees and female-female sexual behaviour in bonobos. However, no study has demonstrated that the administration of oxytocin promotes real-life social interactions in Pan, leaving it unclear whether oxytocin is merely correlated with social behaviors or does affect them in these species. To test this, we administered nebulized oxytocin or saline placebo to a group of female bonobos and subsequently observed changes in their gross behavior during free interaction. We found an overall effect of more frequent grooming in the oxytocin condition. However, on the individual level this effect remained significant for only one participant in our follow-up models, suggesting future work should explore interindividual variation. Our results provide some experimental support for the biobehavioural feedback loop hypothesis, which posits that some functions of the oxytocin system support the formation and maintenance of social bonds through a positive feedback loop; however, further tests with a larger number of individuals are required. Our results, at a minimum, demonstrated that oxytocin affects spontaneous, naturalistic social interactions of at least some female bonobos, adding to accumulating evidence that oxytocin modulates complex social behaviors of Pan.

Video game playing frequency, social cognition, and social behavior in childhood.

Socialization is the basis of human behavior and thus an individual’s social competence is key to creating and maintaining satisfying relationships, communicating with others, and functioning adaptively in society. With video games increasingly omnipresent in the leisure activities of young people, concerns have been raised as to their potential harmfulness, or conversely, their utility with respect to developing cognitive, affective, and social skills. However, reported links between video game playing frequency (VGPF) and markers of social competence are equivocal, with some studies reporting adverse associations and others highlighting measurable benefits. Much of the previous work in this area has focused on adolescents, yet video game use is also common in elementary school children. This study aimed to explore associations between VGPF and three components of social competence: social cognitive skills, social adaptive skills, and social behavior. Children (n = 57, 6–12 years) completed measures of these components, and their parents completed a video game habits questionnaire. Weekly VGPF was positively associated with executive and social behavior difficulties and negatively associated with social adaptive skills and prosocial behavior. Social adaptive skills, empathy, and lower VGPF were independently associated with prosocial behavior, while poorer empathy and executive difficulties were associated with social behavior problems. In conclusion, elementary school children who played video games less frequently in this study displayed better social competence in terms of prosocial behavior, but there was no association between VGPF and social behavior problems. Limiting gaming frequency could possibly increase opportunities for real-life social interaction, promoting prosocial behavior.

Simultaneous study of behavioral synchronization of two individuals during a cooperative task

IntroductionInterpersonally coordinated behaviors are crucial for social interactions.The “Theory of Mind,” or mentalization capacity, of an individual is essential for the establishment of behavioral synchronization. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is used to assess mentalization, social cognition and empathy. Previous RMET studies, investigated people in isolation, not in social situations. It is unclear how the RMET predicts functioning during real-life social interactions.ObjectivesTo investigate the relationship between the performance measured on the RMET test and the synchronous behavior of two individuals interacting with each other during tasks requiring social collaboration.MethodsSample included healthy controls (HC,n=48) and patients with ADHD (n=26) or schizophrenia (SCH,n=36) from an ongoing EEG-hyperscanning study, employing a social coordination condition.We applied a Go/NoGo reaction time(RT) task performed by pairs of participants. Synchronous behavior was characterized by the correlation of participants’ RTs.We used the percent (%) correct responses from the RMET to characterize social cognition.ResultsIn HC, with better social cognitive performance, the correlation of behavioral responses was significantly (p<0.05) higher. In ADHD, better performance on the RMET was also accompanied by better behavioral synchronization, but the association did not reach significance due to the smaller sample size. In SCH, no relationship was detected.ConclusionsIn HC and ADHD, the mentalization ability as measured by RMET is associated with the behavioral synchronization between individuals in social interaction.The lack of association in the schizophrenia group may be due to psychopathological symptoms, which should be elucidated in future research. Funding: Supported by the Hungarian Brain Research program#2017-1.2.1-NKP-2017-0002DisclosureNo significant relationships.