Language and Movement Synchronization in Dyadic Psychotherapeutic Interaction - A Qualitative Review and a Proposal...

Area of Science:

• Psychotherapy research
• Embodied cognition
• Interactional synchrony

Background:

• Verbal communication and movement synchronization are key in individual psychotherapy.
• Dynamic movement coordination is a systemic property of dyadic interaction.
• Movement synchronization enhances linguistic meaning unfolding.

Purpose of the Study:

• To substantiate the importance of synchrony in adult psychotherapy.
• To review evidence from developmental psychology on synchrony.
• To propose criteria for measuring synchrony in dyadic psychotherapy.

Main Methods:

• Review of developmental psychology evidence.
• Discussion of synchrony measurement approaches in naturalistic psychotherapy settings.
• Development of criteria for describing general synchronization and movement synchrony.

Main Results:

• Five general dimensions for synchronization: context, modality, resources, entrainment, time-lag.
• Eight specific criteria for movement synchrony: spatial direction, amplitude, sinuosity, duration, event structure, phase, frequency, content.
• Proposed criteria aim to link movement patterns with linguistic utterances.

Conclusions:

• Synchrony research must address multimodality in embodied interaction for understanding meaning-making in psychotherapy.
• An integrated perspective of movement and language is crucial.
• A classification system for synchrony phenomena can link movement variations with language.