AI-enhanced analysis of naturalistic social interactions characterizes interaffective impairments in schizophrenia.

Social deficits in schizophrenia have been attributed to an impaired attunement to mutual interaction, or "interaffectivity". While impairments in emotion recognition and facial expressivity in schizophrenia have been consistently reported, findings on mimicry and social synchrony are inconsistent, and previous studies have often lacked ecological validity. To investigate interaffective behavior in dyadic interactions in a real-world-like setting, 20 individuals with schizophrenia and 20 without mental disorder played a cooperative board game with a previously unacquainted healthy control participant.