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

Abstract

Emotional attunement, or emotional co-regulation in a relationship, can manifest as interpersonal neural synchrony, where partners exhibit similar anti-phase or phase-shifted brain activity. In adult romantic relationships, emotional attunement may differ according to relationship satisfaction. No study has examined how relationship satisfaction difference influences interpersonal neural synchrony. This exploratory pilot study on 17 couples (unmarried Chinese undergraduate couples in a Southeast Asian university) investigated whether relationship satisfaction difference influenced interpersonal neural synchrony during a shared 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 relationship satisfaction difference modulated interpersonal neural synchrony in the right ventral PFC regions, including the right ventromedial PFC (involved in the encoding of emotional values to stimuli and emotional regulation), right ventrolateral PFC (involved in voluntary emotional regulation) and the right orbitofrontal cortex (involved in processing of emotional experiences and regulation of emotions). This suggested that couples with mismatched relationship satisfaction displayed greater interpersonal neural synchrony, possibly due to mutual social cognitive processes when viewing emotive videos together. Further studies can replicate the findings with larger, diverse samples.

Keywords: emotional attunement; functional near-infrared spectroscopy; interpersonal neural synchrony; relationship satisfaction.

Figure 1

Illustration of the set-up in the lab.

Figure 2

Example of a random sequence of seven video stimuli.

Figure 3

Illustration of the 8 channels used and their corresponding targeted brain regions. Channels 4 and 19 correspond to the left and right VLPFC, respectively. Channels 7 and 14 correspond to the left and right VMPFC, respectively. Channels 6 and 11 correspond to the left OFC, and 13 and 16 correspond to the right OFC.

Figure 4

Scatterplot of the negative linear relationship between relationship satisfaction difference between partners and averaged normalized distance index of the frontal right brain cluster in couples [r = −0.47, p = 0.079].