Socio-emotional synchrony in social interactions: the impact of partner neurotype

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Being a successful navigator of the social world relies on forming and maintaining social relationships; from building lasting friendships to being a skilled mediator in the boardroom. Improved interpersonal rapport between individuals leads to increased interest in future interaction(Crompton...& Ropar, 2020), and greater emotional resonance (i.e., being emotionally 'in sync') with others improves relationship strength(Brown et al., 2022) and promotes prosocial behaviour (West et al., 2021). Additionally, one's body movement when expressing themselves and whether this is congruent with their interaction partner has an important role in social communication (Cook, 2016; Sowden et al.,2021).Recently, the impact of neurodiversity on such socio-emotional experiences has gained interest. Indeed, despite attempts made by autistic individuals to camouflage or 'hide' their autistic traits when interacting with non-autistic peers, cross-neurotype interpersonal interactions (between autistic and non-autistic individuals) are more challenging than same-neurotype interactions (autistic/autistic or non-autistic/non autistic pairs). This includes poorer effectiveness of information transfer (Crompton, Ropar, et al., 2020), social understanding (Crompton, Hallett, et al., 2020) and interpersonal rapport (Crompton...& Ropar,2020). Given growing emphasis on supporting neurodiversity in workplace and education settings (e.g., gov.uk and National Autistic Society), it is timely to investigate barriers and facilitators to successful social interaction between and within neurotypes. The 'double empathy problem', a concept proposed by Milton (2012), describes such bi-directional social understanding difficulties. However, current research fails to explain why same-neurotype interactions are more effective. This project will identify factors contributing to better/worse rapport by designing and testing concrete experimental measures of socio-emotional synchrony between individuals. This will be indexed across three levels of measurement: 1) Experiential (e.g., synchrony in subjective experiences of emotion); 2) Behavioural (e.g., non-verbal expression synchrony) and 3) Bodily (e.g., synchrony in arousal levels).