Advanced search
Publication Cover
Psychotherapy Research Latest Articles
Submit an article Journal homepage
129
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Exploring the role of emotions and conversation content in interpersonal synchrony: A case study of a couple therapy session

Virpi-Liisa Kykyri1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, FinlandORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9394-6716View further author information
ORCID Icon,
Petra Nyman-Salonen1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland;2 Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, FinlandCorrespondence[email protected]
ORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-4532-3159View further author information
ORCID Icon,
Wolfgang Tschacher3 University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, SwitzerlandORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-7357-0280View further author information
ORCID Icon,
Anu Tourunen1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, FinlandORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9709-3319View further author information
ORCID Icon,
Markku Penttonen1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, FinlandORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1033-7286View further author information
ORCID Icon &
Jaakko Seikkula1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland;4 Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences, University of Agder, Kristiansand, NorwayORCID Iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1113-806XView further author information
ORCID Icon
Received 29 May 2023, Accepted 24 May 2024, Published online: 11 Jun 2024

References

  • Adu, J., Owusu, M. F., Martin-Yeboah, E., Pino Gavidia, L. A., & Gyamfi, S. (2022). A discussion of some controversies in mixed methods research for emerging researchers. Methodological Innovations, 15(3), 321–330. doi:10.1177/20597991221123398
  • Atzil-Slonim, D., Soma, C. S., Zhang, X., Paz, A., & Imel, Z. E. (2023). Facilitating dyadic synchrony in psychotherapy sessions: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychotherapy Research, 33(7), 898–917. doi:10.1080/10503307.2023.2191803
  • Behrens, F., Snijdewint, J. A., Moulder, R. G., Prochazkova, E., Sjak-Shie, E. E., Boker, S. M., & Kret, M. E. (2020). Physiological synchrony is associated with cooperative success in real-life interactions. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 19609. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-76539-8
  • Burgoon, J. K., Le Poire, B. A., Beutler, L. E., Bergan, J., & Engle, D. (1992). Nonverbal behaviors as indices of arousal: Extension to the psychotherapy context. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 16(3), 159–178. doi:10.1007/BF00988032
  • Butler, E. A., & Randall, A. K. (2013). Emotional coregulation in close relationships. Emotion Review, 5(2), 202–210. doi:10.1177/1754073912451630
  • Chanel, G., Kivikangas, J. M., & Ravaja, N. (2012). Physiological compliance for social gaming analysis: Cooperative versus competitive play. Interacting with Computers, 24(4), 306–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2012.04.012
  • Chartrand, T. L., & Lakin, J. L. (2013). The antecedents and consequences of human behavioral mimicry. Annual Review of Psychology, 64(1), 285–308. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143754
  • Chartrand, T. L., & Van Baaren, R. (2009). Human mimicry. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 219–274. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00405-X
  • Coutinho, J., Oliveira-Silva, P., Fernandes, E., Gonçalves, O. F., Correia, D., Perrone Mc-Govern, K., & Tschacher, W. (2019). Psychophysiological synchrony during verbal interaction in romantic relationships. Family Process, 58(3), 716–733. doi:10.1111/famp.12371
  • Dale, R., Bryant, G. A., Manson, J. H., & Gervais, M. M. (2020). Body synchrony in triadic interaction. Royal Society Open Science, 7(9), 200095. doi:10.1098/rsos.200095
  • Del Piccolo, L., & Finset, A. (2018). Patients’ autonomic activation during clinical interaction: A review of empirical studies. Patient Education and Counseling, 101(2), 195–208. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2017.08.007
  • de Morais, F., Goldoni, D., Kautzmann, T., da Silva, R., & Jaques, P. A. (2023). Automatic Sensor-free Affect Detection: A Systematic Literature Review. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13711.
  • D'Mello, S. K., & Kory, J. (2015). A review and meta-analysis of multimodal affect detection systems. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 47(3), 1–36.
  • Duncan, B. L., Miller, S. D., Sparks, J. A., Claud, D. A., Reynolds, L. R., Brown, J., & Johnson, L. D. (2003). The Session Rating Scale: Preliminary psychometric properties of a “working” alliance measure. Journal of Brief Therapy, 3(1), 3–12.
  • Eteläpelto, A., Kykyri, V. L., Penttonen, M., Hökkä, P., Paloniemi, S., Vähäsantanen, K., Eteläpelto, T., & Lappalainen, V. (2018). A multi-componential methodology for exploring emotions in learning: Using self-reports, behaviour registration, and physiological indicators as complementary data. Frontline Learning Research, 6(3), 6–36. doi:10.14786/flr.v6i3.379
  • Finset, A., & Ørnes, K. (2017). Empathy in the clinician–patient relationship: The role of reciprocal adjustments and processes of synchrony. Journal of Patient Experience, 4(2), 64–68. doi:10.1177/2374373517699271
  • Fuchs, T., & Koch, S. C. (2014). Embodied affectivity: On moving and being moved. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 508. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00508
  • Gashi, S., Di Lascio, E., & Santini, S. (2018). Using students’ physiological synchrony to quantify the classroom emotional climate. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Joint Conference and 2018 International Symposium on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Wearable Computers (pp. 698–701).
  • Givens, D. B. (2015). Nonverbal neurology: How the brain encodes and decodes wordless signs, signals, and cues. In A. Kostić & D. Chadee (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Nonverbal Communication (pp. 9–30). Springer.
  • Grecucci, A., Theuninck, A., Frederickson, J., & Job, R. (2015). Mechanisms of social emotion regulation: From neuroscience to psychotherapy. In M. L. Bryant (Ed.), Emotion Regulation: Processes, Cognitive Effects and Social Consequences. Handbook of Emotion Regulation (pp. 57–84). Nova Publishers.
  • Gross, J. J., Fredrickson, B. L., & Levenson, R. W. (1994). The psychophysiology of crying. Psychophysiology, 31(5), 460–468. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1994.tb01049.x
  • Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional suppression: Physiology, self-report, and expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 970–986. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.64.6.970
  • Heritage, J., & Drew, P. (1992). Talk at work. Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge University Press.
  • Hugdahl, K. (1996). Cognitive influences on human autonomic nervous system function. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 6(2), 252–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4388(96)80080-8
  • Hughes, C. F., Uhlmann, C., & Pennebaker, J. W. (1994). The body’s response to processing emotional trauma: Linking verbal text with autonomic activity. Journal of Personality, 62(4), 565–585. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1994.tb00309.x
  • Johnson, S. M. (2007). A new era for couple therapy: Theory, research, and practice in concert. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 26(4), 5–16. doi:10.1521/jsyt.2007.26.4.5
  • Karvonen, A., Kykyri, V. L., Kaartinen, J., Penttonen, M., & Seikkula, J. (2016). Sympathetic nervous system synchrony in couple therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 42(3), 383–395. doi:10.1111/jmft.12152
  • Kinreich, S., Djalovski, A., Kraus, L., Louzoun, Y., & Feldman, R. (2017). Brain-to-brain synchrony during naturalistic social interactions. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 17060. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17339-5
  • Kleinbub, J. R. (2017). State of the art of interpersonal physiology in psychotherapy: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2053. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02053
  • Kleinbub, J. R., Talia, A., & Palmieri, A. (2020). Physiological synchronization in the clinical process: A research primer. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 67(4), 420–437. doi:10.1037/cou0000383
  • Koole, S. L., & Tschacher, W. (2016). Synchrony in psychotherapy: A review and an integrative framework for the therapeutic alliance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 862. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00862
  • Kreibig, S. D. (2010). Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review. Biological Psychology, 84(3), 394–421. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.03.010
  • Laitila, A., Vall, B., Penttonen, M., Karvonen, A., Kykyri, V. L., Tsatsishvili, V., Kaartinen, J., & Seikkula, J. (2019). The added value of studying embodied responses in couple therapy research: A case study. Family Process, 58(3), 685–697. doi:10.1111/famp.12374
  • Levenson, R. W., & Gottman, J. M. (1983). Marital interaction: Physiological linkage and affective exchange. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 587–597. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.587
  • Marci, C. D., Ham, J., Moran, E., & Orr, S. P. (2007). Physiologic correlates of perceived therapist empathy and social-emotional process during psychotherapy. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195(2), 103–111. doi:10.1097/01.nmd.0000253731.71025.fc
  • Marci, C. D., Moran, E. K., & Orr, S. P. (2004). Physiologic evidence for the interpersonal role of laughter during psychotherapy. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 192(10), 689–695. doi:10.1097/01.nmd.0000142032.04196.63
  • Marci, C. D., & Orr, S. P. (2006). The effect of emotional distance on psychophysiologic concordance and perceived empathy between patient and interviewer. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 31(2), 115–128. doi:10.1007/s10484-006-9008-4
  • Mayo, O., & Gordon, I. (2020). In and out of synchrony—Behavioral and physiological dynamics of dyadic interpersonal coordination. Psychophysiology, 57(6), e13574. doi:10.1111/psyp.13574
  • Mayo, O., Lavidor, M., & Gordon, I. (2021). Interpersonal autonomic nervous system synchrony and its association to relationship and performance—A systematic review and meta-analysis. Physiology & Behavior, 235, 113391. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2021.113391
  • McKinnon, J. M., & Greenberg, L. S. (2013). Revealing underlying vulnerable emotion in couple therapy: Impact on session and final outcome. Journal of Family Therapy, 35(3), 303–319. doi:10.1111/1467-6427.12015
  • Mogan, R., Fischer, R., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2017). To be in synchrony or not? A meta-analysis of synchrony's effects on behavior, perception, cognition and affect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 13–20. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2017.03.009
  • Moulder, R. G., Boker, S. M., Ramseyer, F., & Tschacher, W. (2018). Determining synchrony between behavioral time series: An application of surrogate data generation for establishing falsifiable null-hypotheses. Psychological Methods, 23(4), 757–773. doi:10.1037/met0000172
  • Nagaoka, C., & Komori, M. (2008). Body movement synchrony in psychotherapeutic counseling: A study using the video-based quantification method. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 91(6), 1634–1640. doi:10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.6.1634.
  • Neimeyer, R. (2009). Constructivist psychotherapy. Distinctive features. Routledge.
  • Nyman-Salonen, P., Kykyri, V. L., Tschacher, W., Muotka, J., Tourunen, A., Penttonen, M., & Seikkula, J. (2021). Nonverbal synchrony in couple therapy linked to clients’ well-being and the therapeutic alliance. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 718353. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.718353
  • Palumbo, R. V., Marraccini, M. E., Weyandt, L. L., Wilder-Smith, O., McGee, H. A., Liu, S., & Goodwin, M. S. (2017). Interpersonal autonomic physiology: A systematic review of the literature. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(2), 99–141. doi:10.1177/1088868316628405
  • Panksepp, J. (2007). Neuroevolutionary sources of laughter and social joy: Modeling primal human laughter in laboratory rats. Behavioural Brain Research, 182(2), 231–244. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2007.02.015
  • Pascual-Leone, A. (2018). How clients “change emotion with emotion”: A programme of research on emotional processing. Psychotherapy Research, 28(2), 165–182. doi:10.1080/10503307.2017.1349350
  • Ramseyer, F., & Tschacher, W. (2008). Synchrony in dyadic psychotherapy sessions. In S. Vrobel, O. E. Roessler, & T. Marks-Tarlow (Eds.), Simultaneity: Temporal Structures and Observer Perspectives (pp. 329–347). World Scientific.
  • Ramseyer, F., Tschacher, W. (2010). Nonverbal synchrony or random coincidence? How to tell the difference. In A. Esposito, N. Campbell, C. Vogel, A. Hussain, & A. Nijholt (Eds.), Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony, (pp. 182–196). Springer.
  • Ramseyer, F., & Tschacher, W. (2011). Nonverbal synchrony in psychotherapy: Coordinated body movement reflects relationship quality and outcome. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 79(3), 284–295. doi:10.1037/a0023419
  • Ramseyer, F., & Tschacher, W. (2014). Nonverbal synchrony of head-and body-movement in psychotherapy: Different signals have different associations with outcome. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 979. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00979
  • Renier, L. A., Schmid Mast, M., Dael, N., & Kleinlogel, E. P. (2021). Nonverbal social sensing: What social sensing can and cannot do for the study of nonverbal behavior from video. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 606548. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.606548
  • Ruhanen, M. (2021). Ruumiillinen synkronia pariterapian hiljaisissa hetkissä [Unpublished Master’s thesis]. University of Jyväskylä.
  • Schoenherr, D., Paulick, J., Worrack, S., Strauss, B. M., Rubel, J. A., Schwartz, B., Deisenhofer, A.-K., Lutz, W., Strangier, U., & Altmann, U. (2019). Quantification of nonverbal synchrony using linear time series analysis methods: Lack of convergent validity and evidence for facets of synchrony. Behavior Research Methods, 51(1), 361–383. doi:10.3758/s13428-018-1139-z
  • Seikkula, J., Karvonen, A., Kykyri, V. L., Kaartinen, J., & Penttonen, M. (2015). The embodied attunement of therapists and a couple within dialogical psychotherapy: An introduction to the relational mind research project. Family Process, 54(4), 703–715. doi:10.1111/famp.12152
  • Slovák, P., Tennent, P., Reeves, S., & Fitzpatrick, G. (2014). Exploring skin conductance synchronisation in everyday interactions. In V. Roto, J. Häkkilä, K. Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, O. Juhlin, T. Olsson, & E. Hvannberg (Eds), Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational, (pp. 511–520).
  • Snyder, D. K., Castellani, A. M., & Whisman, M. A. (2006). Current status and future directions in couple therapy. Annual Review of Psychology, 57(1), 317–344. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070154
  • Tal, S., Bar-Kalifa, E., Kleinbub, J. R., Leibovich, L., Deres-Cohen, K., & Zilcha-Mano, S. (2023). A multimodal case study utilizing physiological synchrony as indicator of context in which motion synchrony is associated with the working alliance. Psychotherapy, 60(1), 86–97.
  • Tourunen, A., Kykyri, V. L., Seikkula, J., Kaartinen, J., Tolvanen, A., & Penttonen, M. (2020). Sympathetic nervous system synchrony: An exploratory study of its relationship with the therapeutic alliance and outcome in couple therapy. Psychotherapy, 57(2), 160–173. doi:10.1037/pst0000198
  • Tourunen, A., Nyman-Salonen, P., Muotka, J., Penttonen, M., Seikkula, J., & Kykyri, V. L. (2022). Associations between sympathetic nervous system synchrony, movement synchrony, and speech in couple therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.818356
  • Tschacher, W., & Haken, H. (2019). The process of psychotherapy. Springer International Publishing.
  • Tschacher, W., Rees, G. M., & Ramseyer, F. (2014). Nonverbal synchrony and affect in dyadic interactions. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1323. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01323
  • Valdesolo, P., Ouyang, J., & DeSteno, D. (2010). The rhythm of joint action: Synchrony promotes cooperative ability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(4), 693–695. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.03.004
  • Wiltshire, T. J., Philipsen, J. S., Trasmundi, S. B., Jensen, T. W., & Steffensen, S. V. (2020). Interpersonal coordination dynamics in psychotherapy: A systematic review. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 44(4), 752–773. doi:10.1007/s10608-020-10106-3
  • Yilmaz, K. (2013). Comparison of quantitative and qualitative research traditions: Epistemological, theoretical, and methodological differences. European Journal of Education, 48(2), 311–325. doi:10.1111/ejed.12014
  • Zaki, J., & Williams, W. C. (2013). Interpersonal emotion regulation. Emotion, 13(5), 803–810. doi:10.1037/a0033839

Related research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.