Anu Tourunen

Relationships are vital for well-being and health, with bodily synchrony – where people's reactions align – playing a key role in forming and maintaining social bonds. The IRSync research examines how individuals synchronize nonverbally through autonomic nervous system responses, movements, and facial expressions. It explores how individual traits, relationship types, and situational factors influence synchrony. The study focuses on six relationship types: couples, friends, siblings, parent and adult child pairs, colleagues, and strangers. Participants engage in paired discussions where emotional climate, cognitive alignment, sense of connection, and the level of cooperation vary. Electrodermal activity, heart rate measures, and video recordings of facial expressions and body movements are analyzed to study synchrony. The research deepens our understanding of nonverbal human connection and produces new resources, including open data for synchrony research.