Existing evidence suggests that in social contexts individuals become coupled in their emotions and behaviors. Furthermore, recent biological studies demonstrate that the physiological signals of interacting individuals become coupled as well, exhibiting temporally synchronized response patterns. However, it is yet unknown whether people can shape each other's responses without the direct, face-to-face interaction. Here we investigated whether the convergence of physiological and emotional states can occur among “merely co-present” individuals, without direct interactional exchanges. To this end, we measured continuous autonomic signals and collected emotional responses of participants who watched emotional movies together, seated side-by-side. We found that the autonomic signals of co-present participants were idiosyncratically synchronized and that the degree of this synchronization was correlated with the convergence of their emotional responses. These findings suggest that moment-to-moment emotional transmissions, resulting in shared emotional experiences, can occur in the absence of direct communication and are mediated by autonomic synchronization.

Behavioral and modeling studies have established that curved and drawing human hand movements obey the 2/3 power law, which dictates a strong coupling between movement curvature and velocity. Human motion perception seems to reflect this constraint. The functional MRI study reported here demonstrates that the brain's response to this law of motion is much stronger and more widespread than to other types of motion. Compliance with this law is reflected in the activation of a large network of brain areas subserving motor production, visual motion processing, and action observation functions. Hence, these results strongly support the notion of similar neural coding for motion perception and production. These findings suggest that cortical motion representations are optimally tuned to the kinematic and geometrical invariants characterizing biological actions.functional MRI ͉ motion perception ͉ movement kinematics ͉ trajectory formation ͉ two-thirds power law H umans can easily perceive and infer emotions and intentions from the movements and actions of other individuals. The perceptual saliency of human movement might be rooted in the close interactions between perception and action (1, 2). Moreover, movements of humans, primates, and possibly also other animals show certain geometric and kinematic regularities, indicating they are governed by a relatively small number of rules, the so-called kinematic laws of motion. These laws of motion were discovered through recording, kinematic analysis, and modeling of the geometrical and temporal features of the hand paths and velocity profiles characterizing these movements. For example, point-topoint reaching movements tend to follow straight hand paths and to have bell-shaped velocity profiles (3). The velocity profiles during curved and handwriting movements are more complicated. As already noted by early investigations, when following a curvilinear trajectory, hand velocity exhibits a strong dependency on the geometrical form of the path.

Recent theories emphasize the dynamic aspects of emotions. However, the physiological measures and the methodological approaches that can capture the dynamics of emotions are underdeveloped. In the current study, we investigated whether moment-to-moment changes in autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity are reliably associated with the unfolding of emotional experience. We obtained cardiovascular and electrodermal signals from participants while they viewed emotional movies. We found that the ANS signals were temporally aligned across individuals, indicating a reliable stimulus-driven response. The degree of response reliability was associated with the emotional time line of the movie. Finally, individual differences in ANS response reliability were strongly correlated with the subjective emotional responses. The current research offers a methodological approach for studying physiological responses during dynamic emotional situations.

Subsequent late diagnosis of ASD after an initial ASD-negative comprehensive assessment is a common clinical experience. Reasons for this scenario may include evolving diagnosis as well as missed and overdiagnosed cases of ASD.

Self-criticism plays a major role in many psychological disorders and predicts poor response to brief psychological and pharmacological treatments for depression. The current study shows that loving-kindness meditation, designed to foster self-compassion, is efficacious in helping self-critical individuals become less self-critical and more self-compassionate. The study also suggests that practising loving-kindness may reduce depressive symptoms and increase positive emotions.