Colloquium

Inbal Ravreby, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Cornell University

Title: Emotional connection through self-other blurring

Abstract: People are social, and emotional connection is a main source of meaning for them. What makes people emotionally connect? Human connections depend on navigating the boundaries between the self and the other, yet the mechanisms underlying this process remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will show how perceived similarity between oneself and others dissolves interpersonal boundaries and fosters emotional connection through self-other blurring across multiple levels. In the physiological domain, I will show that friends smell more similar than random dyads, and that body odor similarity predicts mutual "clicking" between strangers with 71% accuracy, showing literal chemistry in social chemistry. In the motor domain, I will demonstrate that social bonding emerges from a delicate balance between movement synchronization and interaction complexity, with participants pursuing novel, challenging interactions, even at the cost of reduced synchrony. Turning to emotional facial expressions, I will present evidence that in real-life interactions, facial mimicry occurs across both positive and negative social interactions, and for both positive and negative facial expressions, suggesting that it plays a basic role in emotional understanding of others. Finally, I will show that emotional facial expressions serve as unique individual signatures, such that both neural network classification analysis and humans can identify people from their idiosyncratic smile patterns, regardless of facial appearance. This affective identity marker may serve as another similarity cue through which people emotionally connect. Altogether, these findings establish self-other blurring as a fundamental process of human connection, operating through multiple channels.