The role of interpersonal synchrony in building the client-therapist working alliance

Interpersonal synchrony (IS) is the temporal coordination between people during an interaction, observed across modalities (e.g., movement and physiological). Research suggests IS to be a promising embodied marker for the procedural dynamics (i.e., moment-to-moment formation) of the client-therapist working alliance (WA). Despite the evidence linking IS with the WA, little is still known about how different modalities and facets of IS relate to different parts of the WA (i.e., emotional bond and collaborative set), and what drives this relation. The aim of this project is to disentangle and explain the relation between IS and the WA using a multimodal approach.