FIGURE 1.

Social Breathing is a latent construct (e.g., a theoretical entity that cannot be measured directly) representing the fundamental human activity of becoming engaged in a social interaction, including sharing intentions, joint meaning-making, and complex coordination. We list its characteristics in the panel on the left. Numerous research areas attempt to capture this elusive “something” but none address all aspects of Social Breathing. On the right we show a representative, but not exhaustive, set of such research domains. We use Social Breathing to synthesize across domains, making it easier to develop specific and testable hypotheses.