Interpersonal attunement in social interactions: from collective psychophysiology to inter- personalized psychiatry and beyond

Abstract

In this article, we analyse social interactions, drawing on diverse points of views, ranging from dialectics, second-person neuroscience and enactivism to dynamical systems, active inference and machine learning. To this end, we define interpersonal attunement as a set of multi-scale processes of building up and materializing social expectations—put simply, anticipating and interacting with others and ourselves. While cultivating and negotiating common ground, via communication and culture-building activities, are indispensable for the survival of the individual, the relevant multi-scale mechanisms have been largely considered in isolation. Here, collective psychophysiology , we argue, can lend itself to the fine-tuned analysis of social interactions, without neglecting the individual. On the other hand, an interpersonal mismatch of expectations can lead to a breakdown of communication and social isolation known to negatively affect mental health. In this regard, we review psychopathology in terms of interpersonal misattunement, conceptualizing psychiatric disorders as disorders of social interaction, to describe how individual mental health is inextricably linked to social interaction. By doing so, we foresee avenues for an inter- personalized psychiatry, which moves from a static spectrum of disorders to a dynamic relational space, focusing on how the multi-faceted processes of social interaction can help to promote mental health. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.

Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences

“…In their paper, Bolis et al [ 29 ] illustrate the notion of interpersonal attunement, which allows the formation of social expectations in order to successfully interact with others and with oneself. They identify the predictive processing approach as a way to better capture these interactive dynamics.…”

“…[ 2 , 65 ]), and new neuroscience methodologies, including dual-person neuroscience (e.g. [ 29 , 60 ]). We also include a pledge to integrate qualitative microanalyses with quantitative methods [ 5 ].…”

Interacting with autistic virtual characters: Intrapersonal synchrony of nonverbal behavior influences participants' perception

“…Deploying similar strategies to decode multimodal nonverbal behavior as shown for TD observers may probably result in more similar reciprocal response behavior, less prediction errors and ultimately more synchrony. This contributes to timing differences in the production of multimodal nonverbal signals (Bloch et al, 2022) that may further lead to a reciprocal mismatch of produced and perceived timed nonverbal behavior and thus to violations of priors in the sense of a Bayesian brain principle (Bolis et al, 2023;Koban et al, 2019;Parr & Friston, 2019;van de Cruys et al, 2014).…”

A cultural-ecosocial systems view for psychiatry

“…There have been some notable successes in identifying predictors of dynamics in couple interactions (181). New experimental methods have been developed to study the dynamics of dyadic, family, and group interactions (182)(183)(184). Symptom network theory and computational modelling provide new approaches to examining looping dynamics, testing the relative strength of specific linkages and the sensitivity of network dynamics to changes in parameters that can be matched with measurable variables in research and clinical applications [e.g., (185)(186)(187)].…”