A two-person neuroscience approach for social anxiety: A paradigm for interbrain synchrony and neurofeedback.

Abstract

Social anxiety disorder has been widely recognised as one of the most commonly diagnosed 4 mental disorders. Individuals with social anxiety disorder experience difficulties during social 5 interactions that are essential in the regular functioning of daily routines; perpetually motivating 6 research into the aetiology, maintenance and treatment methods. Traditionally, social and clinical 7 neuroscience studies incorporated protocols testing one participant at a time. However, it has 8 been recently suggested that such protocols are unable to directly assess social interaction 9 performance, which can be revealed by testing multiple individuals simultaneously. The principle 10 of two-person neuroscience highlights the interpersonal aspect of social interactions that observes 11 behaviour and brain activity from both (or all) constituents of the interaction, rather than analysing 12 on an individual level or an individual observation of a social situation. Therefore, two-person 13 neuroscience could be a promising direction for assessment and intervention of the social anxiety 14 disorder. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm which integrates two-person neuroscience 15 in a neurofeedback protocol. Neurofeedback and interbrain synchrony, a branch of two-person 16 neuroscience, are discussed in their own capacities for their relationship with social anxiety 17 disorder and relevance to the paradigm. The newly proposed paradigm sets out to assess the 18 social interaction performance using interbrain synchrony between interacting individuals, and to 19 employ a multi-user neurofeedback protocol for intervention of the social anxiety