Résumé
Emotional experiences color the way we interact with the world and pain is one of the most archaic emotions that trigger stereotypical physiological and behavioral responses. Accumulative evidence showed that behavioral synchrony can influence pain threshold by increasing social bonding, yet those studies have neglected the emotional component of pain. Two studies were conducted investigating the impact of aversive electrodermal stimulations on the phenomenological, physiological and motor aspects components of group synchrony.Participants performed oscillatory arm movement under conditions manipulating sensorimotor coupling and pain induction. In a quintet experiment (N = 30), participants performed the movement alone or together, with explicit instructions to synchronize their movement. In a quartet experiment (N = 40), participants also performed the movement alone or together, and with or without explicit instructions to synchronize together. In both experiments, some participants received unpleasant aversive electrodermal stimulations. Motion and electrocardiogram recordings were performed during each trial and participants completed self-reports of social bonding, affective states and pain sensations after each condition.Both studies replicated previous findings showing a reduction of pain with synchrony, associated with an increase in social bonding. However, pain did not disrupt group synchronization, despite its impact on participants’ cardiovascular activity and velocity profiles by inducing acceleration bursts. Therefore, group synchrony appears to be resilient to the perturbation elicited by the administration of an unpleasant perturbation. Importantly, the modulation of cardiac activity (i.e., heartrate and heartrate variability) by the administration of the unpleasant stimulation and the fear of receiving it could also be detected in participants’ body sway, stressing the connection between cardiovascular states and postural stability. Altogether, these results pave the way for future investigations exploring non-invasive kinematics signature of pain states and possible therapeutic interventions using collective synchrony.