Social priming enhances interpersonal synchronization and feeling of connectedness towards schizophrenia patients

TLDR

The mechanisms underlying healthy individuals’ abnormal feelings of contact with schizophrenia patients are unclear, and the spatiotemporal coordination of patients’ bodily movements during interaction remains poorly understood. Interpersonal motor coordination between dyads of patients or healthy controls and synchronization partners was assessed with a hand‑held pendulum task following implicit exposure to pro‑social, non‑social, or anti‑social primes, measuring motor coordination stability and partner likability. Pro‑social priming increased motor coordination stability in schizophrenia patients, which in turn heightened their partners’ feelings of connectedness and correlated with stronger synchronization, indicating that motor coordination partly underlies patients’ social interactions.

Abstract

What leads healthy individuals to abnormal feelings of contact with schizophrenia patients remains obscure. Despite recent findings that human bonding is an interactive process influenced by coordination dynamics, the spatiotemporal organization of the bodily movements of schizophrenia patients when interacting with other people is poorly understood. Interpersonal motor coordination between dyads of patients (n = 45) or healthy controls (n = 45) and synchronization partners (n = 90), was assessed with a hand-held pendulum task following implicit exposure to pro-social, non-social, or anti-social primes. We evaluated the socio-motor competence and the feeling of connectedness between participants and their synchronization partners with a measure of motor coordination stability. Immediately after the coordination task, all participants were also asked to rate the likeableness of their interacting partner. Our results showed greater stability during interpersonal synchrony in schizophrenia patients who received pro-social priming, inducing in their synchronization partner greater feelings of connectedness towards patients. This greater feeling of connectedness was positively correlated with stronger motor synchronization between participants suggesting that motor coordination partly underlies patients' social interactions and feelings of contact with others. Pro-social priming can have a pervasive effect on abnormal social interactions in schizophrenia patients.