ArticleHuman brain mapping2019
Emotions amplify speaker-listener neural alignment.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Intersubject correlation as a predictor of attention: a systematic review.BMC psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Expressing emotions through music.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Intentional sadness contagion: Social bonding with neural decoupling.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Modulation of interbrain synchrony by emotional valence and maternal presence in mother-child dyads: neural links to empathy and attachment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A fNIRS hyperscanning study on enhancing intimacy through emotional self-disclosure from the discloser-responder perspective.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Emotion regulation in mother-child dyads is associated with interbrain synchrony during imagined shared emotional experiences.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- The influence of psychological distance and topic type on inter-brain synchronization of emotion perception during face-to-face communication: an fNIRS hyperscanning study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Making space for stories: promoting physician and medical student well-being through successful medical education storytelling events.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- How a speaker herds the audience: multibrain neural convergence over time during naturalistic storytelling.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- How does the human brain process noisy speech in real life? Insights from the second-person neuroscience perspective.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2024Review
- How a speaker herds the audience: Multi-brain neural convergence over time during naturalistic storytelling.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Virtual social interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic: the effect of interpersonal motor synchrony on social interactions in the virtual space.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Experiencing happiness together facilitates dyadic coordination through the enhanced interpersonal neural synchronization.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Classification of emotion categories based on functional connectivity patterns of the human brain.NeuroImage · 2022Article
- The strength of our stories: a qualitative analysis of a multi-institutional GME storytelling event.Medical education online · 2021Article
- The default mode network: where the idiosyncratic self meets the shared social world.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2021Review
- The integration of social and neural synchrony: a case for ecologically valid research using MEG neuroimaging.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Individuals often align their emotional states during conversation. Here, we reveal how such emotional alignment is reflected in synchronization of brain activity across speakers and listeners. Two "speaker" subjects told emotional and neutral autobiographical stories while their hemodynamic brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The stories were recorded and played back to 16 "listener" subjects during fMRI. After scanning, both speakers and listeners rated the moment-to-moment valence and arousal of the stories. Time-varying similarity of the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) time series was quantified by intersubject phase synchronization (ISPS) between speaker-listener pairs. Telling and listening to the stories elicited similar emotions across speaker-listener pairs. Arousal was associated with increased speaker-listener neural synchronization in brain regions supporting attentional, auditory, somatosensory, and motor processing. Valence was associated with increased speaker-listener neural synchronization in brain regions involved in emotional processing, including amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal pole. Speaker-listener synchronization of subjective feelings of arousal was associated with increased neural synchronization in somatosensory and subcortical brain regions; synchronization of valence was associated with neural synchronization in parietal cortices and midline structures. We propose that emotion-dependent speaker-listener neural synchronization is associated with emotional contagion, thereby implying that listeners reproduce some aspects of the speaker's emotional state at the neural level.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.