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DATE: September 12, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Tracking brain waves reveals a surprising twist in how different generations form social bonds
Getting to know someone across multiple encounters can ease feelings of loneliness, and new research indicates that these budding relationships physically synchronize brain activity in unexpected ways. A new study, published in PLOS Biology, suggests that when younger and older adults regularly participate in creative activities together, their brains coordinate differently over time compared to pairs of the same age. Over six weeks of collaborative drawing, people of different generations showed decreasing neural synchronization, while same-age peers showed increasing synchronization, even as both groups reported feeling closer to their partners.
People of all ages experience perceived social isolation, and community programs that mix generations are a popular way to combat these feelings of loneliness. These programs rely on the idea that repeated interactions foster meaningful social bonds. However, the physical brain changes that happen as these relationships form are mostly unknown to scientists.
“As the global population ages, and with social isolation acknowledged as a global health risk, it is critical to understand how social bonds form between people from the same and different generations,” Ryssa Moffat, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich’s Social Brain Sciences Lab, told PsyPost. “My motivation to study social interactions between seniors and young adults grew from positive experiences getting to know seniors around the world. The idea for this project really gained momentum when I read statistics about the growing proportion of older adults globally and learned about the risks of loneliness and social isolation.”
To study these physical changes in real time, scientists use a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This involves participants wearing a flexible cap embedded with sensors that shine safe levels of light through the scalp to measure changes in blood flow in specific brain areas. This tool allows researchers to track interpersonal neural synchrony, which is the extent to which two people’s brain activity aligns in time while they interact.
Researchers pay special attention to two specific brain regions during social tasks. The first is the temporoparietal junction, an area near the ears that helps people process social information and understand others’ perspectives. The second is the inferior frontal gyrus, an area near the temples involved in paying attention to the same thing as a partner.
A progression of recent research provides evidence that social bonds shift brain-to-brain dynamics as relationships unfold. For instance, a 2022 meta-analysis found that working together on a cooperative task consistently synchronizes the frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. This aligns with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that brain synchronization between humans and dogs increases as they become more familiar with each other over several days.
In human relationships, a 2024 experiment indicated that brain synchrony between two people naturally shifts over the course of a conversation depending on whether they are friends or strangers. Building on this evidence, the authors of a 2024 review proposed that using mobile brain scanning to track neural alignment across repeated sessions is essential for understanding how social bonds develop across generations. The new research, led by Moffat and Emily S. Cross, put this concept into practice.
The researchers recruited 61 pairs of strangers from the community. They formed 31 intergenerational pairs, consisting of one younger adult and one adult aged 69 or older, and 30 same-generation pairs made up of two younger adults. The pairs met once a week for six weeks to complete a creative drawing program.
At the start of each session, the participants filled out surveys measuring their current feelings of loneliness, their sense of closeness to their drawing partner, and their attitudes toward people of different age groups. After completing the surveys, researchers fitted the participants with the sensor caps.
The pairs then completed three separate drawing tasks using oil pastels, lasting five minutes each. They were instructed not to talk during the drawing portion. For the first drawing, they worked independently, separated by a visual divider. For the next two drawings, the divider was removed and the pair worked together on a single piece of paper. The sessions concluded with a short puzzle or game.
“It is very exciting to have mapped how synchrony emerges among younger and older adults for the first time,” Moffat said. She noted that they were able “to show how patterns of synchrony change across repeated encounters with information from each encounter, instead of just the first and the last encounter.”
Over the six weeks, feelings of loneliness dropped by about 1 percent per session for both groups. Feelings of social closeness increased by about 4 percent per session, indicating that the program successfully fostered social bonds. “These small but robust changes were observed for same-generation pairs and intergenerational pairs alike,” Moffat noted. The intergenerational pairs generally reported feeling less lonely than the same-generation pairs, and they held more positive attitudes toward other generations.
When analyzing the brain data from all the sessions combined, the researchers found that interpersonal neural synchrony was greater when the pairs drew together compared to when they drew alone. This brain alignment was especially high in the temporoparietal junction and inferior frontal gyrus.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost earlier in 2026, which found that engaging in shared activities together produces greater interpersonal neural synchrony than doing them alone, though that study measured brain alignment during shared music listening among friends rather than interactive drawing across different generations.
Tracking the brain alignment across the six weeks presented an unexpected pattern. For the same-generation pairs, neural synchrony in the right temporoparietal junction increased as the weeks went on. For the intergenerational pairs, neural synchrony in this same area actually decreased over the six weeks.
“I was initially surprised to see synchrony levels decrease for intergenerational dyads,” Moffat explained. “My assumption that we would see increases in synchrony was based on the existing studies comparing strangers, friends, and romantic partners who attend a single session. In these studies, the closer people are to one another, the more synchrony they tend to show.”
The authors suggest that this divergence might reflect how different age pairs integrate social information. “The main takeaway from our study is that the way in which people’s brains synchronize during cooperation depends on who they’re interacting with and the common ground shared by the interacting people,” Moffat said. Because synchrony is believed to reflect how fluently people can predict each other, it is amplified when prediction is less fluent.
Younger pairs might monitor each other’s attention more closely as they become familiar, leading to higher synchrony. As Moffat noted, “they may engage in unpredictable behaviors to keep the interactions interesting and engaging.” In contrast, mixed-generation pairs might require less active monitoring of their partner’s attention once they establish a comfortable routine. “As older and younger people become better acquainted and form more common ground, they can predict each other more fluently and we see reductions in synchrony between brains in certain brain regions,” she added.
The researchers also noticed relationships between the physical brain data and the survey responses. Across all the pairs, reporting higher social closeness predicted an increase in synchrony between the inferior frontal gyrus and the temporoparietal junction. Pairs with more similar levels of loneliness showed greater synchrony in the inferior frontal gyrus when drawing together, which might indicate that sharing a similar social mindset shapes how easily two people coordinate their attention.
One common misconception to avoid is the assumption that more synchrony is always better. “If we start from the standpoint that synchrony increases when predicting another person’s actions is more challenging, it’s probable that excessively high levels of synchrony indicate excessive challenge and that very low levels may indicate a lack of engagement,” Moffat explained. Instead, a “happy medium might be optimal,” where navigating different levels of predictability keeps people socially fit.
There are a few other things to keep in mind about this study. The brain scans targeted specific areas associated with social processing and attention, so the results do not capture activity across the entire brain. The experiment also specifically restricted verbal communication during the drawing tasks, meaning brain alignment might look different if the pairs were talking freely.
Additionally, the study only compared mixed-generation pairs to young-adult pairs. The researchers did not include a group of two older adults, which means some of the differences observed between the groups might relate to general age-related brain changes rather than the specific dynamic of mixing generations. Technical issues also caused a few sensors to fail during the experiment, slightly reducing the amount of data available for the right side of the brain.
Future studies could explore whether other types of common ground, such as shared cultural backgrounds or long-term hobbies, shape brain synchronization over time. Expanding this research into larger group settings could also provide a better understanding of how community arts programs physically benefit participants.
Moffat and her colleagues plan to expand on these findings by analyzing the other behavioral data they collected. “Alongside the recordings of brain activity, we also recorded a multitude of other signals including motion capture of body movements, performance on collaborative games and puzzles, the actual drawings that the participants co-created, as well as participants’ subjective experiences,” she said. “Our next steps are to analyze the other signals and to bring them together to understand how social connections form from a holistic perspective.”
The study, “Social interactions between people of same and different generations shape longitudinal changes in interpersonal neural synchrony, loneliness, and social connection,” was authored by Ryssa Moffat, Guillaume Dumas, and Emily S. Cross.
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