Nonverbal attunement between depressed patients and an interviewer predicts subsequent improvement

Depressed patients' support-seeking behaviour and the responses to this behaviour by others (support-giving) are presumed to play a causal role in depression. In interactions between normals, attuning nonverbal behaviour (i.e., equalizing levels of specific behavioural activities) is important for satisfaction of the participants with the interaction. We investigated the attunement of nonverbal support-seeking and support-giving of 31 depressed patients and 1 interviewer during a 20-min admission interview. We defined attunement as the absolute difference between patients' and interviewers' nonverbal behaviour. It was found that the more attunement increased over the interview, the more favourable the subsequent course of depression was. The findings emphasize the potential role of interpersonal processes in depression.