Interactional Synchrony

The coordinated, often unconscious alignment of conversational partners' body postures, gestures, gaze, vocal rhythm, and facial expressions during social interaction. Research in social psychology and affective neuroscience has linked interactional synchrony to rapport, empathy, trust, and mutual understanding. For accessibility design, synchrony matters because disabled users whose input or output modalities differ from sighted/hearing norms — for example, a blind user who orients their ear rather than their face toward a speaker — can break expected synchrony patterns, causing sighted partners to misread them as disengaged. Assistive systems that provide a shared expressive focus or redistribute attention can help restore synchrony without demanding conformity to normative body language.