Romantic Partners with Matching Relationship Satisfaction Showed Greater Interpersonal Neural Synchrony When Co-viewing Emotive Videos: An Exploratory fNIRS Hyperscanning Study

Abstract

ABSTRACTEmotion attunement refers to emotional co-regulation in an interpersonal relationship. Attunement can manifest as synchrony at the neurophysiological level, where partners exhibit similar brain responses to each other, known as interpersonal neural synchrony. However, in adult romantic relationships, the level of satisfaction that partners experience in a relationship may differ from each other, thus the extent of emotion attunement may differ according to the perceived relationship quality. Thus far, no study has examined how difference in relationship satisfaction between partners influence interpersonal neural synchrony. This exploratory study on 17 heterosexual Singaporean Chinese non-married couples investigated whether romantic partners’ relationship satisfaction difference influenced the extent of interpersonal neural synchrony within a couple when sharing an emotive experience. Each couple wore an fNIRS cap, to measure brain activity in their prefrontal cortex (PFC), while co-viewing seven videos intended to evoke positive, negative or neutral emotions. We found preliminary evidence that differences in self-reported relationship satisfaction between romantic partners modulated interpersonal neural synchrony in the frontal right cluster of the PFC involved in social decision-making. This finding suggested that couples in which partners reported closer matching of relationship satisfaction displayed greater interpersonal neural synchrony, possibly due to more similar social cognitive processes when viewing emotive videos together. Further studies are recommended to replicate the findings with larger and more diverse samples.