Difficulty leading interpersonal coordination: towards an embodied signature of social anxiety disorder

Abstract

Defined by a persistent fear of embarrassment or negative evaluation while engaged in social interaction or public performance, social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common psychiatric syndromes. Previous research has made a considerable effort to better understand and assess this mental disorder. However, little attention has been paid to social motor behavior of patients with SAD despite its crucial importance in daily social interactions. Previous research has shown that the coordination of arm, head or postural movements of interacting people can reflect their mental states or feelings such as social connectedness and social motives, suggesting that interpersonal movement coordination may be impaired in patients suffering from SAD. The current study was specifically aimed at determining whether SAD affects the dynamics of social motor coordination. We compared the unintentional and intentional rhythmic coordination of a SAD group (19 patients paired with control participants) with the rhythmic coordination of a control group (19 control pairs) in an interpersonal pendulum coordination task. The results demonstrated that unintentional social motor coordination was preserved with SAD while intentional coordination was impaired. More specifically, intentional coordination became impaired when patients with SAD had to lead the coordination as indicated by poorer (i.e., more variable) coordination. These differences between intentional and unintentional coordination as well as between follower and leader roles reveal an impaired coordination dynamics that is specific to SAD, and thus, opens promising research directions to better understand, assess and treat this mental disorder.

Effects of time-delay in a model of intra- and inter-personal motor coordination

“…In particular, the variation in φ rel of the stable anti-phase solutions near ∆ = 0 is larger than that of the in-phase solutions. These results are consistent with experimental findings demonstrating that intra-as well as inter-personal anti-phase coordination is less stable than the in-phase coordination [9,24,31,32].…”

“…A detuning between the oscillators is one of the main parameters that can be controlled in experiments. For example, it is a common experimental practice in studies of inter-personal coordination to detune the intrinsic frequencies between the pendula driven by the wrist movement by |∆| < 0.4 Hz [24,31,32]. Furthermore, even for the case of intra-personal coordination of wrists movements (or if the pendula in the experimental set-up are identical) one should expect a small detuning due to small differences between the left and the right hand (or due to individual differences between participants) [9,24].…”

Reduced nonverbal interpersonal synchrony in autism spectrum disorder independent of partner diagnosis: a motion energy study

“…IPS may underlie interaction success because it can promote effective turn-taking, as well as connectedness, trust and prosocial behaviour [11,19], and it can even predict the success of a problem-solving exercise, negotiation or meeting [20,21]. It has also been associated with various psychopathological conditions like schizophrenia [22,23], social anxiety disorder [24] and borderline personality disorder [25]. We therefore argue for an in-depth investigation of IPS in ASD, in order to understand its contribution to the social interaction problems characteristic of the condition.…”

Coordination Matters: Interpersonal Synchrony Influences Collaborative Problem-Solving

“…Prior to the beginning of the procedure we collected basic demographic information (i.e., participant age and sex) along with assessments of personality characteristics previously shown to relate to interpersonal synchrony (e.g., social value orientation, see Lumsden, Miles, Richardson, Smith, & Macrae, 2012; social anxiety, see Varlet et al, 2014) and Lost on the Moon (LotM) problem-solving performance. As shown in Table A1 (categorical measures) and Table A2 (continuous measures) there were no systematic differences between conditions on any of the measures.…”