Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Interpersonal synchronization supports social interaction by enabling coordinated behavior and shared emotional experience, yet how emotions influence the mechanisms underlying synchronization remains poorly understood. We investigated how emotional feedback influences auditory–motor synchronization between dyadic partners with faster and slower Spontaneous Production Rates (SPR). Nonmusicians completed a joint tapping task with pre-feedback, feedback (matched or mismatched positive or negative), and post-feedback phases. Temporal asynchronies were modeled using a delay-coupled oscillator model to estimate participant-specific coupling parameters. Model comparisons between delay-coupled and zero-delay models showed that allowing for a delay significantly improved model fit. Slower-SPR partners coupled more strongly than faster partners, while feedback valence did not affect coupling strength. Coupling strength was positively associated with arousal in pre-feedback trials and with perceived synchronization success under mismatched feedback trials. These findings demonstrate the role of intrinsic frequency differences and shared feedback structure in organizing interpersonal synchronization and its subjective correlates.