ABSTRACT
Even though verbal communication is crucial in social exchanges, non-verbal communication is known to be a strong and necessary conveyor of social information. More specifically, motor coordination of interacting people plays a central role in the success of social exchanges. Abnormal movements have been reported during interpersonal interactions of patients suffering from schizophrenia. Breakdowns in motor coordination, which is an early and primary feature of this illness, could explain accompanying deficits in social interaction. Comparing a healthy group to a schizophrenia patients group performing intentional and unintentional social motor coordination in a hand-held pendulums oscillating task, Varlet et al. (2012) showed that unintentional social motor coordination was preserved while intentional social motor coordination was impaired, particularly for a difficult (anti-phase) pattern. This finding suggests that impaired interpersonal motor coordination might be a specific behavioral signature of schizophrenia. A next step is to investigate whether improving interpersonal motor coordination can be used to improve social interaction of schizophrenia patients. This question however depends on whether interpersonal bodily coordination can affect interpersonal mental coordination and vice versa. This is what we attempted to ascertain in this current study.
