Who clicks with whom? The emergent dynamics of social connection across neurotypes
Abstract
Social connection is often conceptualized as an individual competence, yet it fundamentally unfolds through dynamic coordination between people. To test what drives social connection across diverse interaction styles, we examined naturalistic conversations between autistic and non-autistic adults using a round-robin design. We combined multimodal behavioral tracking—spanning dozens of behaviors across facial expression, head movement, vocal prosody, and turn-taking—with dispositional profiling across same- and mixed-neurotype dyads. Non-autistic dyads reported higher rapport than mixed pairs. While individual dispositions (traits, states) shaped evaluations, non-verbal synchrony emerged as the sole behavioral predictor of rapport across all dyad types. In contrast, none of the individual behaviors were linked to connection. Autistic participants showed greater motivation to interact again with their partners. By demonstrating that rapport operates through interpersonal coordination even across contrasting communicative profiles of autistic and non-autistic adults, these findings establish that social connection is an emergent property of interacting minds.
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BibTeX
@misc{matyjek2026clicks,
title = {{Who clicks with whom? The emergent dynamics of social connection across neurotypes}},
author = {Magdalena Matyjek and Isabel Dziobek and Salvador Soto-Faraco and Antonia Hamilton},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/kv5z9_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/kv5z9_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Who clicks with whom? The emergent dynamics of social connection across neurotypes
AU - Magdalena Matyjek
AU - Isabel Dziobek
AU - Salvador Soto-Faraco
AU - Antonia Hamilton
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/25
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/kv5z9_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/kv5z9_v1/
AB - Social connection is often conceptualized as an individual competence, yet it fundamentally unfolds through dynamic coordination between people. To test what drives social connection across diverse interaction styles, we examined naturalistic conversations between autistic and non-autistic adults using a round-robin design. We combined multimodal behavioral tracking—spanning dozens of behaviors across facial expression, head movement, vocal prosody, and turn-taking—with dispositional profiling across same- and mixed-neurotype dyads. Non-autistic dyads reported higher rapport than mixed pairs. While individual dispositions (traits, states) shaped evaluations, non-verbal synchrony emerged as the sole behavioral predictor of rapport across all dyad types. In contrast, none of the individual behaviors were linked to connection. Autistic participants showed greater motivation to interact again with their partners. By demonstrating that rapport operates through interpersonal coordination even across contrasting communicative profiles of autistic and non-autistic adults, these findings establish that social connection is an emergent property of interacting minds.
ER -