Social Coordination and Connection

Fruitful social interaction relies on the coordination of behaviour. As a pervasive aspect of everyday activity, aligning thoughts and actions with others lays a critical foundation for building successful relationships. An essential aspect of interpersonal alignment is the coordination of movement, referred to as social motor coordination (SMC). Grounded in the science of coordination dynamics, SMC reflects a process of mutual entrainment whereby the movements of one person spontaneously influence, and are influenced by, the movements of those around them. By attending to other people, shared patterns of behaviour can emerge without conscious intention, and give rise to shared interpersonal experiences, a key ingredient for building effective social bonds. Our ongoing research on SMC is directed towards understanding:

  1. How SMC promotes effective social interaction, rapport, prosocial behaviour, cooperation and creativity, and increases individuals feelings of social connectedness, as well as how negative social contexts disrupt the emergence of this form of coordination.
  2. How SMC differs for children and adults with social interaction disorders (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety disorder) and can be enhanced to promotion more effective and positive social interaction.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS:

Fitzpatrick, P., Romero, V., Amaral, J., Duncan, A., Barnard, H., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2017). Evaluating the importance of social motor synchronization and motor skill for understanding autism. Autism Research, 10, 1687-1699.
Kallen, R. W., Douglas, H. M., Chaudoir, S. R., & Richardson, M. J. (2016). Postural Sway Dynamics and Complexity Matching during the Disclosure of a Concealable Stigmatized Identity. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems (COMPLEXIS 2016), pp. 89-94.
Fitzpatrick, P., Romero, V., Amaral, J. L., Duncan, A., Barnard, H., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2017). Social Motor Synchronization: Insights for Understanding Social Behavior in Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-16.
Romero, V., Fitzpatrick, P., Roulier, S., Duncan, A., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2018). Evidence of embodied social competence during conversation in high functioning children with autism spectrum disorder. PloS one, 13(3), e0193906.
Fitzpatrick, P., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2013). Dynamical Methods for Evaluating the Time-Dependent Unfolding of Social Coordination in Children with Autism. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7, doi: 10.3389/fnint.2013.00021
Lumsden, J., Miles, L. K., Richardson, M. J., Smith, C. A., & Macrae, N. C. (2012). Who Syncs? Social Motives and Interpersonal Coordination. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 746–751.
Miles, L. K., Lumsden, J., Richardson, M. J., & Macrae, N. C. (2011). Do Birds of a Feather Move Together? Group Membership and Behavioral Synchrony. Experimental Brain Research, 211, 495-503.
Miles, L. K., Griffiths, J. L., Richardson, M. J., & Macrae, N. C. (2010). Too Late to Coordinate: Target Antipathy Impedes Behavioral Synchrony. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 52–60.
Marsh, K. L., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2009). Social connection through joint action and interpersonal coordination. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 320-339.