Symposium: Synchrony Shaping the Interpersonal Relationships of Dyads and their Interactions in Face of Stress

Synchrony was shown to be a manifestation of the dyad’s experiences and synchrony was found in dyads faced with stress. The first presentation (Sfeir) is a systematic review aiming at defining what synchrony is and how synchrony shapes family relationships. When parents and children synchronize with one another, this tends to reduce stress levels while increasing positive affect. Synchrony would allow families to bounce back after problems and was shown to buffer the effect of stress by facilitating the transmission of resilience and helping family members be in harmony. After setting the ground on synchrony, the second presentation (Wang) will combine all dyadic synchronizations to quantify triadic synchronization. The validity of these measures was tested on data generated from latent state models with different parameter settings, which can simulate the synchronization features of family interactions. The results show that the adapted multiplication of dyadic synchronizations can reflect the synchronization features in the data. This synchrony can differ from one culture to another, as the third presentation (Pirrone) identified four different couples’ emotion clusters in 150 Belgian and Japanese dyadic couples. Japanese dyads were found to both suppress their negative emotions whereas the Belgian dyads were characterized by collaborative emotion dynamics and emotion stability, high and low levels of positive and negative emotions, respectively. Synchrony can also be observed in mother-infant interaction. In a remote Face-to-Face Still-Face session with 173 mothers from the PEACE Study, the fourth presentation (Jiang) found a significant interaction effect between maternal depression and distress tolerance on infant negative affect at the reunion episode. Mothers with lower distress tolerance and a depression diagnosis had infants with lower negative affect at reunion compared to those without a depression diagnosis. On a physiological level, synchrony is an index of dyadic coregulation as the fifth presentation (Oshri) introduces a new model of dyadic coherence using a range of time-scales on 142 dyads. While faced with a stressor, results showed that family environment (enmeshment and family conflict) predicted physiological coherence at distinct time-scales. Accounting for changes in physiological synchrony across family contexts may help determine the impact of synchrony on child development.