Social bonds come in a variety of qualities and quantities, stretching from early life attachment to maternal and paternal care-givers, across romantic relationships to life-long friendships. As a highly complex phenomenon, they can be understood on a social, biological and psychological level. This symposium aims at exploring various aspects of the bio-psychological intricacies of human relationships, both in the laboratory and in everyday life.

Eileen Lashani will be presenting a study on both physiological and psychological countertransference reactions to different attachment narratives. In her study, participants showed differential psychological, heart rate and skin-conductance reactivity when confronted with secure, avoidant or anxious attachment experiences.

Next, Ekaterina Schneider will report on how childhood touch experiences, current intimate touch, and attitudes toward touch relate to social relationships, mental health, and hormonal states in everyday life.

Expanding from the individual to the dyadic level, Magdalena Degering will introduce a study on empathic stress in friendships, where one dyad member faces a psychosocial stressor while the other initially observes passively before being permitted to provide help. Preliminary data on helping behavior and its determining factors will be presented.

Last, Dora Hopf will expand the social bond from the laboratory to everyday life, examining psychoneuroendocrinological synchrony in older couples. Cortisol, oxytocin and alpha-amylase dyadic covariation were investigated both in terms of their overall linkage and the potential moderation of real life events.

Social relationships are central to our well-being, yet they can also be a source of distress. The psychodynamic concept of countertransference refers to the positive and negative emotional responses that arise in social interactions, shaped by both the interaction partner and own past experiences. Attachment theory suggests that these responses may be influenced by underlying attachment representations, which shape how individuals perceive and emotionally respond to others, and how others respond to them in return.

This study investigates how prototypical narratives from individuals with different attachment representations elicit distinct countertransference responses in listeners. Specifically, we examine whether attachment narratives not only evoke psychological and social reactions but also manifest physiologically in heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance.

A sample of 100 healthy participants listened to secure, avoidant, and anxious attachment narratives in randomized order. After each audio sequence, they reported their socio-emotional reactions via questionnaires. Physiological markers were derived from continuous ECG, respiration and electrodermal measurements throughout the session.

Results indicated that well-being declined after exposure to the avoidant and anxious attachment narratives. However, only the avoidant narrative elicited negative countertransference reactions and was linked to reduced concentration in listeners. While average physiological responses did not differ significantly across narratives, an analysis of temporal dynamics revealed distinct reactivity patterns for each attachment style.

These findings enhance our understanding of how attachment experiences shape interpersonal interactions, particularly regarding countertransference. Beyond everyday social interactions, this research contributes to a more comprehensive empirical framework for countertransference processes, a key component of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Interpersonal affectionate touch plays a crucial role in social bonding, stress regulation, and psychological well-being. However, individual differences in past touch experiences and attitudes toward touch remain understudied. This study aimed to validate the German version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ-G) and investigate how childhood touch experiences, current intimate touch, and attitudes toward touch relate to social relationships, mental health, and psychobiological states in everyday life. Data from 1,319 study participants suggest good psychometric properties of the TEAQ-G, confirming its reliability and validity as a tool for assessing touch experiences and attitudes. Regression analyses revealed that more positive childhood touch and current intimate touch were associated with lower levels of attachment avoidance, stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness, as well as higher resilience, family functioning, and relationship satisfaction. These findings were further supported by ecological momentary assessment data from 254 subjects, associating affectionate touch experiences with more favorable daily psychobiological states, including lower levels of stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burden related to the COVID-19 pandemic, lower cortisol, and moderately higher salivary oxytocin levels. Moreover, both childhood touch experiences and attitudes toward intimate touch significantly moderated the relationship between daily affectionate touch reports and individuals’ psychobiological stress response and well-being. Our results emphasize the developmental importance of early touch experiences and highlight the lasting impact of both early and ongoing touch on attachment, social relationships, psychological well-being, and hormonal responses in everyday life.

Social bonds play a vital role in navigating challenging life situations. While individuals experiencing distress can benefit from the support of close others, these same close others are also susceptible to the transmission of stress through mere observation. This phenomenon, known as empathic stress, is typically studied in controlled dyadic laboratory paradigms, where one dyad member, the target, is exposed to a stressor while the other, the observer, passively observes the situation. However, in real-life scenarios, observers are rarely passive bystanders; rather, they often have the opportunity to intervene or provide support. This necessitates an accurate assessment of the target's distress, which in turn enables an appropriate and effective response.

We introduce a modified empathic stress paradigm that extends the passive observation approach by incorporating a helping option for a subset of observers. In a sample of 80 same-sex friend dyads, one group (N = 30) underwent the standard empathic Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), in which the target was confronted with a psychosocial stressor and the observer passively observed the situation. In contrast, a second group (N = 50) experienced a similar paradigm, but after a predefined time point, observers were given the opportunity – though not required – to support the target.

Preliminary findings focusing on helping behavior, examining sex differences in helping propensity and motivation, as well as autonomic stress responses in both groups, will be presented.

Synchrony in physiology in romantic couples has been suggested to be a result of joint interaction and co-regulation of stress and affect. However, it is subject of debate whether synchrony in endocrine levels - especially in oxytocin - is generally beneficial or if a reciprocal transmission of stress may even be stress-increasing. The aim of this study was to investigate hormonal synchrony in older couples in relation to situational mindfulness, relationship conflict (quarreling), as well as situational resilience and subjective stress levels. A total of N = 26 individuals (i.e., N = 13 couples) aged between 52 and 75 years provided saliva samples and self-report measures 12 times over the course of 2 days (312 measures in total). Superior to randomly scrambled dyads, multilevel models predicted cortisol, alpha-amylase, and oxytocin levels from one partner for the other. Synchrony was higher at times of high levels of quarreling but mitigated in moments of high mindfulness. Moreover, oxytocin synchrony was reduced in couples exerting higher average levels of stress. We interpret this finding as buffering personal factors to protect against the transmission of dyadic stress. To draw implications for clinical interventions to promote these factors and given the preliminary character of the sample and the effects, future studies need to systematically expand this field of research and application.