Moodsyncs: Investigating Physiological Synchrony Through Collaborative Gameplay
Rita Paulete, Daniela Sousa, Daniel Agostinho, Miguel Castelo-Branco, Marco A. Simões · 2025
To lead healthy and fulfilling lives, humans rely heavily on their social skills. As such, a severe deficit in social competencies can lead to mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. As social difficulties represent one of the core deficits in the Autism Spectrum (AS), this population is particularly vulnerable to this reality. That is why it is necessary to develop accessible and personalized solutions for social skills training in autism that can reach the biggest number of individuals in this population. In this paper, we propose a solution designed to address this demand. A collaborative serious game that we have called MoodSyncs. In this game, we ask the players to synchronize the continuously varying facial expressions of two avatars by independently controlling the speed of each one of them. While playing, a set of multimodal biosignals are simultaneously acquired from the players. We present a preliminary analysis of the physiological synchrony (PS) emerging between dyads during gameplay and its relationship to the individuals' self-perception of interpersonal connectedness during the game. The results have uncovered some emerging dynamics in PS during gameplay and an interesting relationship between the dyads' PS and their reported sensation of interpersonal connectedness.