Aligning With Others’ Emotions

When we’re trying to teach children to relate to others in empathic and considerate ways, it’s exciting to think about a neurological concept called social-emotional matching. Matching is a way that our brains synchronize with others’, and it happens all the time.

When a friend or colleague shares an upset, we show empathy through eye contact and sympathetic facial expressions. Our ability to align with their emotions is part of being fully present and connecting. When people’s emotions are synced, neurons in our brains create matching patterns. This  synchrony occurs when collaboration between people is working well.

Social-emotional matching also has a central role in interactions that promote closeness between parents and children. It’s been widely noted how that emotional alignment is one of the ways we show  love with babies. When we hear a baby cry, we are hard-wired to their distress; otherwise, it would be easy to ignore their crying. When we pick up and rock a baby, it soothes both of us. That’s called “co-regulation,” and it goes on throughout childhood.

Adults’ abilities to match their child’s emotional state, showing that they are fully present through their gaze and facial expressions, keeps children feeling safe and understood. It shows we “get” them. When children feel close to the adults in their lives, they are more apt to comply with their wishes.

One of the secrets of getting children to modulate their energy is to think about the power of matching. We wouldn’t tell our upset friend that their dilemma wasn’t really a problem and they should just calm down, but there’s a long tradition of responding to children that way.

New brain research shows that matching our energy to a child’s, no matter how briefly, can foster co-regulation. For example, instead of telling a group of noisy children to be quiet, we could quickly match their mood, create vigorous activity, then move to a calmer energy. On the other hand, matching a child’s upset and frustration with an understanding expression allows us to synchronize and problem-solve together. The payoff is that engaging in social-emotional matching with children teaches them to match with one another.

Matching doesn’t just apply to individual interactions; it also relates to groups. One of the ways we can help children learn social skills is by showing them how to enter a situation by looking at how others are acting, then matching their energies. When we coach children to attune to others, we help them understand the context of a social situation. This is a happy awareness to develop in this convivial social season.