Reframing rapport across communicational domains

Rapport is essential for successful human interaction, representing the gratifying experience of attunement and getting along well with a communication partner. Notably, psychiatry has rarely treated rapport as an explicit measurable process, despite its reliance on sustained interpersonal connection, sensitive information disclosure, and therapeutic alliance. With reference to earlier conceptual work, and drawing on interdisciplinary literature, we conceptualize rapport as the dynamic coordination of behavioral, affective, and cognitive signals within dyadic interaction. For successful communication, as opposed to disturbed communication, it is recommended to situate rapport within broader accounts of feedback, mutual fit, efficiency, and flexibility of communication. Advances in multimodal interaction research (e.g., gaze, prosody, gesture, posture, motion) provide options for objective validation of the subjective rapport experience. These methods assess alignment and disruption of communicative signals across participants. Applications span science communication, education, marketing, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, especially in cases involving communication disturbances such as autism spectrum disorder. We outline an integrated framework of rapport and a pilot study design for continuous real-time rapport measurement by human raters or automated systems. Recognizing rapport as a measurable clinical process grounds psychiatry within the broader science of human interaction research.