Gender differences in interpersonal emotion regulation: A hyperscanning study of neural and behavioral synchrony

While interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) plays a crucial role in mental health and social relationships, the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying gender differences in IER remain poorly understood. This study investigated how gender influences IER effectiveness through movement and neural synchrony. We recruited 52 same-gender dyads (25 male-male, 27 female-female) to participate in an emotion regulation task while their brain activity was recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and their movements were captured for motion energy analysis (MEA). During the task, one participant (experiencer) viewed emotion-inducing videos while their partner (regulator) attempted to improve their emotional state using either affective engagement or cognitive engagement strategies. Results showed that female dyads achieved better regulatory outcomes, including greater perceived strategy implementation and effectiveness, and exhibited higher levels of both movement and neural synchrony in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex compared to male dyads, regardless of strategy type. Movement synchrony analysis revealed that synchronization was consistently led by the experiencer across all conditions. Importantly, in female dyads, both movement and neural synchrony positively correlated with the experiencer's perception of strategy. These findings suggest that gender differences in IER outcomes may be closely related to behavioral and neural alignment, possibly reflecting underlying joint attention mechanisms. This study is the first to investigate emotion regulation through the combined use of fNIRS hyperscanning and MEA in the context of gender differences, providing novel insights into the neural and behavioral bases of gender differences in social-emotional processes.