Background The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of interpersonal coordination (i.e., covariation over time) in different modalities (e.g., physiology, language) during psychotherapy and their importance for understanding the dynamics of psychotherapeutic interaction and efficacy. Methods We conducted a systematic review of all studies examining some form of interpersonal coordination in a psychotherapeutic context. Results We first summarize details of the included studies such as gender composition, therapy types, and methods used. The collation of these studies provided evidence that, during psychotherapeutic contexts, interpersonal coordination occurs in physiology, movements, interpersonal displays, and language/vocalizations. Further, it also showed that movement coordination was most frequently associated with psychotherapy outcomes, physiological coordination was most frequently associated with empathy, and coordination in a variety of modalities including language/vocalizations were most frequently associated with therapeutic alliance. Conclusions We discuss these results, shortcomings with the current literature, and highlight three crucial questions for future research. Research on interpersonal coordination in psychotherapy has potential to advance the both the research and practice of psychotherapy.

Symbolic artifacts present a challenge to theories of neurocognitive processing due to their hybrid nature: they are at the same time physical objects and vehicles of intangible social meanings. While their physical properties can be read of their perceptual appearance, the meaning of symbolic artifacts depends on the perceiver's interpretative attitude and embeddedness in cultural practices. In this study, participants built models of LEGO bricks to illustrate their understanding of abstract concepts. They were then scanned with fMRI while presented to photographs of their own and others' models. When participants attended to the meaning of the models in contrast to their bare physical properties, we observed activations in mPFC and TPJ, areas often associated with social cognition, and IFG, possibly related to semantics. When contrasting own and others' models, we also found activations in precuneus, an area associated with autobiographical memory and agency, while looking at one's own collective models yielded interaction effects in rostral ACC, right IFG and left Insula. Interestingly, variability in the insula was predicted by individual differences in participants' feeling of relatedness to their fellow group members during LEGO construction activity. Our findings support a view of symbolic artifacts as neuro-cognitive trails of human social interactions.

Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and multiple timescales are nested in cooperative gestures. Data are in Finnish with English translations.

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This paper is an empirically-based theoretical contribution to the field of research that investigates the function of trust and re-enactment in psychotherapeutic interaction. We use an ecological, embodied approach that pays attention to how human interaction is constrained by multiple timescales (past, present and future). The analysis sheds light on how trust, here in terms of a therapeutic alliance, is enabled, performed and maintained in interaction through the work with embodied re-enactments of previous events. Specifically, we describe how this therapeutic work constitutes an emerging, situated opportunity for teaching/practising embodied emotion regulation in the form of a co-participated enaction of “taking a deep breath,” and we emphasise how embodied, co-participated re-enactment of past (dys)functional behaviours outside of therapy can be a resource for redirecting, teaching and reinforcing therapeutically relevant behaviours in the context of therapy presenting themselves as fruitful opportunities for facilitating incremental change. Further, psychotherapy serves as a useful case for demonstrating the relevance of such an embodied interaction approach far more generally.

The current study presents an exploratory analysis of using Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) to analyze text data from an Expressive Writing Intervention (EWI) for Danish women treated for Breast Cancer. The analyses are based on the analysis of essays from a subsample with the average age 54.6 years (SD = 9.0), who completed questionnaires for cancer-related distress (IES) and depression symptoms (BDI-SF). The results show a significant association between an increase in recurrent patterns of text structure from first to last writing session and a decrease in cancer-related distress at 3 months post-intervention. Furthermore, the change in structure from first to last essay displayed a moderate, but significant correlation with change in cancer-related distress from baseline to 9 months post-intervention. The results suggest that changes in recurrence patterns of text structure might be an indicator of cognitive restructuring that leads to amelioration of cancer-specific distress.

In this paper, we investigate the intimate link between hands and minds – or rather: How the hands are a means for exploring thoughts in collaboration with others. Specifically, this study investigates a series of locally occurring instances of gestural reuse in naturally occurring psychotherapeutic interaction. The repetition of gestural sequences and formats in interaction has been researched as serving pragmatic functions of building cohesion (McNeill & Levy, 1993) and managing different aspects of turn-taking (Koschmann & LeBaron, 2002). Taking a micro-analytic approach to the study of gesture, we show how reusing other participants’ gestures in the context of psychotherapy serves additional functions: As affordances for shared, embodied cognition. The study contributes to the growing body of research on gesture as a co-participated, co-operative (Goodwin, 2013, 2018) and embodied phenomenon that criss-cross the boundaries of inside-the-skull, individual-centered and socially distributed cognition.

Moving their bodies in knowledgeable and professional ways in order to handle and connect affectively with infants entails a large part of child health care nurses' work. We deploy a phenomenological approach to videoanalysis of interaction to analyze an episode of a 1-month-old infant visiting the child health care clinic with their caregiver to have their body assessed for a neonatal stepping. Focusing on the co-movement of the baby and the nurse, we ask: how do various ways of moving as a co-embodied entity allow and corporeally prompt the baby's age-appropriate bodily ability to emerge? We develop the notion of professional interkinesthesia to indicate specific forms of body work of nurses which in this case entails moving together with the baby to make her successfully perform a specific health care task—the stepping. Building on Charles Goodwin's concept of professional vision concept of professional vision, we uncover how the nurse moves and touches the infant's body in ways relevant to the institutional task. The study shows that accomplishing “normally” developed neonatal stepping is not work accomplished by the baby alone but requires that the bodies of the baby and the professional move in unison. While neonatal stepping is but one specific type of health care task, we propose that nurses' work entails numerous forms of professional touch and interkinesthesia that make it possible to successfully perform different types of health care operations.