No abstract

[CHAPTER] The reproduction of another individual’s emotions in the self – the embodiment of perceived emotions – has been demonstrated to constitute one mechanism for emotional information processing. That is, seeing someone’s emotion expressions and using one’s own face to make the same expression helps the perceiver represent the emotion of the other. When members of a dyad mimic each other’s emotion expressions and by consequence converge in their underlying physiology over time we say that the dyad has reached a state of affective synchrony. The present chapter brings together recent theorizing and research on physiological and expressive affective synchrony. We propose affective synchrony serves three interrelated functions: it enables efficient information exchange, allows for interpersonal emotion regulation, and builds social bonds. We review evidence for the contexts in which affective synchrony arises, propose and evaluate the benefits and costs of achieving these states, and end by suggesting paths for future research in this area.

During conversations, people face a tradeoff between establishing common ground (e.g., understanding each other) and making interesting and unique contributions. Making an unpredictable and semantically divergent topic change may be interesting but runs the risk of being incomprehensible. How do people balance this tradeoff when deciding which concepts to reference, and does it matter how well they know their conversation partner? In the present work, participants made stream-of-consciousness word associations either with a partner or alone—simplified versions of dialogue and monologue. Participants made semantically narrower and more predictable word associations with a stranger than alone (Study 1), suggesting that they constrain their associations to establish common ground. Increasing closeness (Study 2) or having a prior relationship (Study 3) did not moderate this effect. Thus, even during a task that does not depend on establishing common ground and mutual understanding, people sacrifice being interesting for the sake of being understood.