Mapping the Shared Brain

The ability to detect the neural processes underlying the formation of a shared identity between interacting individuals would reveal the unconscious psychological framework that underpins social behaviour. In the first phase of our project we used EEG as a tool of classifying individual emotional status, based on the theory that social identity is based on shared emotion. We used a rigorously-defined experimental approach and obtained strikingly different classification rates compared to other researchers. This speaks to the methods and approaches currently used within the field. We provide a critique of methods with the aim of building new, more rigorous, approaches to EEG-based classifiers of emotion. In the second phase we used a peer-reviewed method of classifying stages in the development of a shared identity via observed behaviour to identify events within EEG of freely interacting dyads to map the unconscious emergence of a shared identity and will present these findings.