Two-Person Approaches to Studying Social Interaction in Psychiatry: Uses and Clinical Relevance

Abstract

Social interaction is ubiquitous in human society. The two-person approach-a new, powerful tool to study information exchange and social behaviors-aims to characterize the behavioral dynamics and neural mechanisms of real-time social interactions. In this review, we discuss the benefits of two-person approaches compared to those for conventional, single-person approaches. We describe measures and paradigms that model social interaction in three dimensions (3-D), including eye-to-eye, body-to-body, and brain-to-brain relationships. We then discuss how these two-person measures and paradigms are used in psychiatric conditions (e.g., autism, mood disorders, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and psychotherapy). Furthermore, the advantages of a two-person approach (e.g., dual brain stimulation, multi-person neurofeedback) in clinical interventions are described. Finally, we discuss the methodological and translational challenges surrounding the application of two-person approaches in psychiatry, as well as prospects for future two-/multi-person studies. We conclude that two-person approaches serve as useful additions to the range of behavioral and neuroscientific methods available to assess social interaction in psychiatric settings, for both diagnostic techniques and complementary interventions.

Dual brain stimulation enhances interpersonal learning through spontaneous movement synchrony

“…Finally, alike most brain-stimulation studies, our data provide only a characterization of the behavioral consequences of brain stimulation, without a complementary description of the neurophysiological processes ongoing during stimulation. Our approach is certainly sufficient to (i) provide a causal relationship between a neural signal of interest and a resulting behavior or (ii) inspire interventions aimed to augment or potentially restore learning ( Bolis et al., 2017 ; Zhang et al., 2018 ; Redcay and Schilbach, 2019 ; Pan and Cheng, 2020 ). However, when it comes to the interpretability of our research in the context of ongoing neurophysiological debates, it might be ideal to also obtain a brain measurement concurrently.…”

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