Inter-brain coupling tracks emotional co-regulation.

Overview

1. Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
2. The State Key Lab of Brain-Machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
3. Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development and Mental Health, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
4. Department of Clinical Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
5. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Tübingen Center for Mental Health (TüCMH), University Hospital of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
6. German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), Partner Site, Tübingen, Germany
7. Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
8. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA

Abstract

When we have a negative emotional experience, we often recount this experience to others. Such emotional sharing plays a key role in building and maintaining interpersonal relationships, and is a vital component of most psychotherapies. Yet, while research shows the importance of social relationships for brain health, the neural underpinnings of emotional sharing remain largely unknown. Here, we asked whether successful processing and regulation of negative emotions can be linked to shared brain responses between dyads during and after emotional sharing. Participants watched videos eliciting either negative or neutral emotions, after which they shared their feelings about these videos with a friend. We simultaneously recorded the brain activity of both friends using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and compared inter-brain coupling within sharer-listener dyads before, during, and after sharing sessions. We found that shifts in inter-brain coupling were associated with changes in mood. Specifically, an increase in inter-brain coupling after recounting a video that elicited negative emotions was associated with reduced anger and dejection in listeners and increased vigor in sharers. These findings suggest that inter-brain coupling facilitates the co-regulation of negative emotions, and thereby maintaining a healthy homeostatic balance. This knowledge holds potential relevance for informing psychotherapeutic interventions.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-026-01455-9.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Data availability

De-identified data is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The experiment was not preregistered.

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Version 2, 28 September 2026

• Publisher: n/a → Springer Science+Business Media

Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 7 authors, 5 keywords, 12 MeSH terms, 63 references.

Cite

This paper

Pan, Y., Porteous, F., Rosenbaum, D., Fallgatter, A., Ehlis, A.-C., Koole, S. L., & Dikker, S. (2026). Inter-brain coupling tracks emotional co-regulation. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 26(5), 2167-2179. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-026-01455-9

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