In Sync and Out
Assistant Professor Sophie Wohltjen analyzes conversations to predict when people feel social connection, research aimed at strengthening relationships in an era of loneliness.
With loneliness and social isolation recognized as a major public health risk for Americans, affecting both mental and physical health, Assistant Professor Sophie Wohltjen is striving to uncover how people form connections in everyday interactions.
“My research asks a simple but surprisingly deep question: What does it actually mean to be ‘in sync’ with another person, and how does that feeling help us connect?” Wohltjen said.
“When people interact, they are constantly juggling information—listening to words, reading facial expressions, tracking body language, and responding in real time, all while expressing their own thoughts and feelings,” she noted. “My work studies how these behaviors naturally fall into and out of alignment with one another during interaction.”
In conversations, sometimes people mirror one another closely, and other times they diverge, change topics, or introduce something new. “Moving into synchrony and out of it can both help build a sense of connection,” she said. “By studying natural, unscripted conversations, I aim to understand how these subtle patterns predict moments when people feel especially close, understood, or engaged.”
A team of undergraduate research assistants helps Wohltjen analyze moments during conversation when people make facial expressions. “We’re hoping to see moments when their expressions naturally align,” she said.
“By better understanding how connection forms in everyday interactions, we can gain insight into how relationships are built—and how they might be strengthened, even in brief encounters or remote communication,” she said.
Wohltjen hopes to develop a new graduate-level course focused on how to study real social interactions between pairs and groups of people. “Students will learn how to think about interactions as dynamic systems and will discuss whether and why it’s important to study people in natural settings,” she said. “The course will also introduce tools for analyzing how people influence one another over time, including synchrony, turn-taking, and leader-follower dynamics. A mini-lab component will teach students how to analyze interaction data using Python.”
As an undergraduate herself, Wohltjen was fascinated by how music conveys emotion and meaning. Later, while working at the National Institutes of Health, she shifted to studying why some people—such as individuals with autism—have a harder time forming social connections. She began studying interpersonal synchrony in graduate school. “I studied this process using dual eye-tracking, which allowed me to measure how two people’s attention fluctuates together during real conversations,” Wohltjen said. “All this work has led to the broader framework for understanding social connection that I have developed, in which connection is not something that depends on perfect harmony but rather is built through both coordination and divergence.”
Wohltjen is also an affiliate member of UT’s Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity. “I’m excited about the opportunity to collaborate with other faculty across disciplines who are asking big questions about complex social systems,” she said.