Abstract
Emotions play a fundamental role in human interactions and trigger responses in physiological, psychological,and behavioral modalities. Interpersonal coordination often entails attunement between individuals in variousmodalities. Previous research has elucidated the mechanisms of interpersonal synchronization and the emo-tions aroused by joint action: cardiac activity aligns in disputing marital couples, spectators share enjoymentin observing live dance performances, and joint finger-tapping evokes positive emotions. However, little isknown about the impact of emotions on intentional interpersonal synchronization. To address this problem,we conducted an experiment in 2022 asking 60 participants to engage in a three-way finger-tapping synchro-nization task. We systematically induced emotional states (positive, neutral, and negative) with social compar-ison feedback using success–failure manipulations. An analysis of behavior synchronization using theKuramoto order parameter revealed that negative emotion induction significantly diminished time spent in syn-chrony compared to positive induction. Moreover, the results exposed incremental struggles in attaining higherlevels of synchronization (Q2–Q3) after the induction of negative emotions. These outcomes further substan-tiate the necessity of integrating the indices of agents’ emotions into interpersonal synchronization and coor-dination models. We discuss the implications of this work for research on interpersonal emotion in joint actionand applied outcomes in emotion-aware technologies and interventions