Impact of emotion-laden acoustic stimuli on group synchronisation performance

Abstract

The ability to synchronise with other people is a core socio-motor competence acquired during human development. In this study we aimed to understand the impact of individual emotional arousal on joint action performance. We asked 15 mixed-gender groups (of 4 individuals each) to participate in a digital, four-way movement synchronisation task. Participants shared the same physical space, but could not see each other during the task. In each trial run, every participant was induced with an emotion-laden acoustic stimulus (pre-selected from the second version of International Affective Digitized Sounds). Our data demonstrated that the human ability to synchronise is overall robust to fluctuations in individual emotional arousal, but performance varies in quality and movement speed as a result of valence of emotional induction (both on the individual and group level). We found that three negative inductions per group per trial led to a drop in overall group synchronisation performance (measured as the median and standard deviation of Kuramoto’s order parameter—an index measuring the strength of synchrony between oscillators, in this study, players) in the 15 sec post-induction. We report that negatively-valenced inductions led to slower oscillations, whilst positive induction afforded faster oscillations. On the individual level of synchronisation performance we found an effect of empathetic disposition (higher competence linked to better performance during the negative induction condition) and of participant’s sex (males displayed better synchronisation performance with others). We believe this work is a blueprint for exploring the frontiers of inextricably bound worlds of emotion and joint action, be it physical or digital.

Negative emotions disrupt intentional synchronization during group sensorimotor interaction.

“…Moreover, the grouplevel analysis provides a framework for empirical research into the effect of collective effervescence and the group-related tasks that are otherwise not accessible at the dyad level (Keltner & Haidt, 1999). This rationale gives rise to a relatively new research trend of group synchronization (e.g., Bien ́kiewicz et al, 2023;Dale et al, 2020; IMPACT OF EMOTIONS ON GROUP SYNCHRONIZATION 3 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Collective Emotion: A Framework for Experimental Research

“…Salmela and Nagatsu (2016) argued that constitutive aspects of collective emotion (e.g., joint attention, interpersonal synchrony, mutual awareness of shared concerns) are key processes to ensure successful joint action, especially impulsive joint actions engaged in without prior deliberation and planning. However, despite some evidence regarding the relation between emotion and joint action (Beaurenaut et al, 2021;Bien ́kiewicz et al, 2023), the role of collective emotion in coordinating joint action remains experimentally under-explored.…”