Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences

The study of interpersonal bodily coordination, both in laboratory and in semi-naturalistic conditions, can reveal subtle phenomena that take place during social interactions. The coordination of interpersonal variables spans a range of timescales and has been associated with longer-term cognitive and affective aspects of interpersonal interaction; e.g., conversation, teacher-student interaction, synchrony in psychotherapy (Kleinbub 2017), and interpersonal influences on physiology. A general question of interest concerns the kinds of causal and constitutive links between interactive and unconscious coordination and interpersonal affect/cognition. This question is particularly relevant for studies of embodied social interaction during psychotherapy.

 

A valuable example in the field of psychotherapy study is the work by Ramseyer and Tschacher (2011). The authors investigate correlations between interpersonal body motion coordination and therapeutic outcome. While the former is easily measurable and occurs at the scale of seconds or less, the latter condenses a broad set of factors based on therapeutic experience and corresponds roughly to a timescale of whole sessions and longer. Taking this work as an example, we propose to briefly examine the possible explanations for these correlations across such qualitatively different measures and timescales. we also suggest that further analysis beyond direct correlations may provide relevant evidence linking coordination with affect and, thus, with therapeutic alliance, that is, with the collaborative relationship between patient and therapist aimed at overcoming patient's suffering.

 

Embodied intersubjectivity, from an enactive perspective, is always directly or indirectly linked to processes of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007), i.e., processes where the active embodied sense-making of a participant in a social interaction is influenced, oriented, enhanced, thwarted, and sometimes even co-constituted by the activities of other participants. One of the implications of this view is that coordination breakdowns and their joint recovery mark important events of shared sense-construction in an interaction. For this reason, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) claim that the relation between coordination dynamics and affect/cognition is not a direct mapping between presence or absence of synchronized movement and positive or negative rapport, emotion, and joint cognitive activity.

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In view of this, we propose that a more informative measure for this relation is the quantity and quality of transitions between different states of coordination rather than the absolute values of intercorporeal synchrony. Transitions out of and into states of coordination can indicate how participants deal with breakdowns and recoveries in their interaction indicating passages between different phases of the dyadic relationship. Breakdowns and destabilizations are not contingent phenomena the participants could do without; they are instead necessary for changes, particularly second-order changes, to occur.

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References:

 

De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 6(4), 485-507.

 

Kleinbub, J. R. (2017). State of the art of interpersonal physiology in psychotherapy: a systematic review. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 2053.

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.