Abstract:

Synchronized movement has a profound origin in collective rituals. A collective ritual requires participants to perform certain actions together, such as simultaneously chanting and bowing. However, synchronized movements can also be observed in daily secular social situations. Synchronized movements are common in collective folk dances of some ethnic groups in China. For example, Left Foot Dance of the Yi, which has been selected as a national intangible cultural heritage in China, features as few as seven or eight and as many as hundreds of dancers. The dancers start with their left foot when dancing to the rhythm of the ukulele, the leading instrument of the Yi. Although the dance steps vary, all dancers complete the steps according to the same rhythm and movement sequence.
First, this paper distinguishes between the synchronized movement that is characteristic of social life and the synchronized movement of collective rituals. Herein, we explain the substitutive and compensatory effect of social life synchronized movement on collective rituals in terms of mental health. Regarding the trend in which synchronized movements emphasize the matching of periodic behaviors with the same frequency and/or period and the coordination and consistency of actions, synchronized movements in secular life are the same as those in collective rituals. However, social life synchronized movement does not have the opaque qualities of collective ritual causality, and this kind of synchronized movement is not embedded in the symbolic meaning of rituals. Social life synchronized movement has fewer restrictions on participants’ qualifications, time, and space, as well as looser requirements on repetition times and fixed sequences. Thus, social life synchronized movement—instead of the collective ritual—plays a psychologically protective role for individuals and groups in establishing social bonds and improving mental health.
Second, we propose five types of synchronized movements in social life by different classification standards: common or self-created synchronized movements, synchronized movements with different phases, those with different levels of consciousness, those with different interaction objects, and those synchronized movements with different coordination modes. We elaborate on the psychological effects and psychophysiological mechanisms of these five types of social life synchronizations. Different types of synchronized movements have different degrees of enhancement on social response factors, such as prosocial behavior, social bonding perception, social cognition, and emotion. For example, previous research has shown that anti-phase synchronized movement in drumming activities affects the synchrony effect whereas in-phase synchronized movement does not. In-phase synchronized movement is associated with higher levels of perceived cohesion. In addition, synchronized movement is related to mental health, which can promote positive emotions and subjective well-being and reduce work stress. At present, researchers mainly use the neurobiological theory, attention theory, affective theory, sensory-motor theory, theory of dynamic attending, the blurring-of-self model, and other theories to explain and study the psychological effects and psychophysiological mechanisms of synchronized movements. Among them, the neurobiological theory has been supported in a large number of empirical studies.
Future studies should investigate the psychological effects and psychophysiological mechanisms that differs in different types of synchronized movements. Furthermore, future studies should also compare the characteristic, effects and psychophysiological mechanisms of synchronized movement in collective rituals and in social life. By doing so, we can further reveal the similarities, differences, and significance of two these two different synchronized movements to humans. In addition, researchers should pay attention to the synchrony effect and the specific process mechanism of different group size in future study. Different from existing theories, we propose another two similar concepts of social life synchronized movements, that are collective directional movement and mimicry. Based on that, we suggest the concepts of social life synchronized movement, collective directional movement, and mimicry should be distinguished.

Key words: synchronized movement of social life, collective ritual, social bonding, mental health