ReviewSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2021
Interactional synchrony: signals, mechanisms and benefits.
Review in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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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
93 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Systematic Review on Parent-Child Synchrony: The Role of Stress, Resilience and Psychopathology.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2026Pooled it
- Physiological attunement and flourishing: understanding the influence of relationships on health.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Interpersonal motor synchrony in autism: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Recent Trends in Non-invasive Neural Recording Based Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Analysis on Multidisciplinary Human Interactions for Understanding Brain Dynamics: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Interpersonal Synchrony in the Context of Caregiver-Child Interactions: A Document Co-citation Analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Pooled it
- You Are Always on My Mind: Neural Synchrony Between Mothers and Their 2-Year-Olds During Collaborative Play.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Inter-brain coupling during naturalistic collaborative Tangram solving in child dyads: an exploratory fNIRS hyperscanning study.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Prediction, pain, and the power of context: toward a contemporary identity for the chiropractic profession.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2026Review
- Adult-to-infant unidirectional neural coupling mediates selective social learning in infants from the United Kingdom and Singapore.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year.eLife · 2026Article
- Review
- Finding agreement: Functional magnetic resonance imaging hyperscanning reveals that mental state space exploration facilitates opinion alignment.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2026Article
- Heart rate synchrony as a marker of real-world social engagement.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Inter-brain processes during Live and Represented social moments are inter-related and shaped by behavioral synchrony.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The Social, Decoupled Self: Interpersonal Synchronization of Breathing Alters Intrapersonal Cardiorespiratory Coupling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Mother-Child Synchrony and Behavioral Problems in Chinese Children: A Preliminary fNIRS-Hyperscanning Study.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- Modulation of interbrain synchrony by emotional valence and maternal presence in mother-child dyads: neural links to empathy and attachment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Remote collaboration in virtual reality induces physiological synchrony comparable to face-to-face interaction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Shared breath of joy enhances empathy through breathing synchronization.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- I sync, therefore I am: brain-body synchrony in typical and disordered consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Review
33 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many group-living animals, humans included, occasionally synchronize their behavior with that of conspecifics. Social psychology and neuroscience have attempted to explain this phenomenon. Here we sought to integrate results around three themes: the stimuli, the mechanisms and the benefits of interactional synchrony. As regards stimuli, we asked what characteristics, apart from temporal regularity, prompt synchronization and found that stimulus modality and complexity are important. The high temporal resolution of the auditory system and the relevance of socio-emotional information endow auditory, multimodal, emotional and somewhat variable and adaptive sequences with particular synchronizing power. Looking at the mechanisms revealed that traditional perspectives emphasizing beat-based representations of others' signals conflict with more recent work investigating the perception of temporal regularity. Timing processes supported by striato-cortical loops represent any kind of repetitive interval sequence fairly automatically. Additionally, socio-emotional processes supported by posterior superior temporal cortex help endow such sequences with value motivating the extent of synchronizing. Synchronizing benefits arise from an increased predictability of incoming signals and include many positive outcomes ranging from basic information processing at the individual level to the bonding of dyads and larger groups.
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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.