Resilience in context: Eye-gaze synchrony and stress regulation in family triads across cooperation and conflict

Biobehavioral synchrony models propose that coordination among interacting individuals supports the regulation of stress responses, yet the specific physiological mechanisms linking social coordination to stress reactivity and recovery remain unclear. We examined these mechanisms in triadic family interactions using a multimodal design combining mobile eye tracking, autonomic physiology, and self-report. Fifty-one family triads (mother–father–child) completed a Family Discussion Task comprising cooperative and conflict discussions. Two forms of triadic eye-gaze synchrony—mutual gaze and joint attention—were quantified and related to sympathetic (skin conductance level; SCL) and parasympathetic (heart rate variability; HRV) responses during stress reactivity and recovery. The conflict discussion elicited robust changes in subjective experience, including increased perceived conflict and negative affect and decreased cooperation, communication satisfaction, and joy, alongside increases in SCL, particularly in children. HRV showed no uniform modulation between discussion contexts. Eye-gaze synchrony varied systematically with interaction context: mutual gaze decreased during conflict, whereas joint attention showed meaningful between-family variability and was positively associated with familial trait resilience. Reductions in mutual gaze were associated with heightened sympathetic reactivity in more demanding contexts, suggesting that decreases in affiliative gaze coordination accompany increased physiological arousal. In contrast, increases in joint attention predicted more adaptive affective responses during conflict and enhanced parasympathetic recovery afterward. These findings indicate that distinct forms of gaze coordination relate to different components of the stress response and highlight the importance of distinguishing affiliative and task-oriented synchrony processes in naturalistic family interactions.