DeCon: A tool to detect emotional concordance in multivariate time series data of emotional responding

• Emotional response concordance remains an enigma in affective science, partly due to a lack of appropriate statistical methods to study it.
• We introduce a tool, named DeCon, to study two forms of emotional response concordance, patterning and synchronization.
• Applying DeCon to data of physiological emotional responses found partial evidence for the occurrence of concordance.
• The size and nature of observed patterning and synchronization was strongly person-dependent.

The occurrence of concordance among different response components during an emotional episode is a key feature of several contemporary accounts and definitions of emotion. Yet, capturing such response concordance in empirical data has proven to be elusive, in large part because of a lack of appropriate statistical tools that are tailored to measure the intricacies of response concordance in the context of data on emotional responding. In this article, we present a tool we developed to detect two different forms of response concordance—response patterning and synchronization—in multivariate time series data of emotional responding, and apply this tool to data concerning physiological responding to emotional stimuli. While the findings provide partial evidence for both response patterning and synchronization, they also show that the presence and nature of such patterning and synchronization is strongly person-dependent.