Most of life’s greatest moments—landing a dream job, learning something new, falling in love—begin with a single positive social interaction. Positive social interactions may feel effortless as they are happening, but they require people to manage a cascade of social cues—adapting, moment by moment, to each other’s words, facial expressions, body language, and actions—each of which may vary from culture-to-culture, or even person-to-person.

Sophie Wohltjen studies how people manage this impressive feat of social coordination in ways that create lasting social connections. Her research interests include:

• Interpersonal synchrony—when people synchronize with each other, when they don’t, and why some people tend to synchronize more than others.

• Affective communication—how people express their own emotions while simultaneously making predictions about how people around them might be feeling.

• Multi-modal social coordination—how different “channels” of communication (e.g., facial expressions, eye contact, speech) interact to build successful conversation.

Wohltjen’s research links basic cognitive processes observed via rigorous, tightly controlled experimental paradigms with naturalistic studies of social interaction. Her work uses a range of computational methods to explore ways that people coordinate with each other—including natural language processing, cluster analyses, and time series analyses—and she has designed workshops that teach others how to use these tools to collect and analyze their data. She will be teaching Social Psychology (PSYC 360) in fall 2025.