Approximate heavy-quark spin and flavor symmetry and chiral symmetry play an important role in our understanding of the nonperturbative regime of strong interactions. In this work, utilizing the unitarized chiral perturbation theory, we explore the consequences of these symmetries in the description of the interactions between the ground-state singly charmed (bottom) baryons and the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons. In particular, at leading order in the chiral expansion, by fixing the only parameter in the theory to reproduce the Λ b (5912) [Λ * b (5920)] or the Λ c (2595) [Λ * c (2625)], we predict a number of dynamically generated states, which are contrasted with those of other approaches and available experimental data. In anticipation of future lattice QCD simulations, we calculate the corresponding scattering lengths and compare them to the existing predictions from a O(p 3 ) chiral perturbation theory study. In addition, we estimate the effects of the next-to-leading-order potentials by adopting heavy-meson Lagrangians and fixing the relevant low-energy constants using either symmetry or naturalness arguments. It is shown that higher-order potentials play a relatively important role in many channels, indicating that further studies are needed once more experimental or lattice QCD data become available.In recent years, heavy-flavor hadron physics has yielded many surprising results and attracted a lot of attention due to intensive worldwide experimental activities, such as BABAR [1], Belle [2, 3], CLEO [4], BES [5], LHCb [6], and CDF [7]. The discoveries and confirmations of the many XY Z particles have established the existence of exotic mesons made of four quarks, such as the Z c (3900) [8,9] and the Z(4430) [10,11], and aroused great interest in the theoretical and lattice QCD community to understand their nature, though no consensus has been reached yet (see, e.g.,Ref.[12]).Different from the case of heavy-meson states, no similar exotic states have been firmly established in the heavy-flavor baryon sector, partly due to the fact that their production is more difficult. Up to now, there have only been a few experimental observations of excited charmed and bottom baryons (see Ref. [13] for a recent and comprehensive review). In the bottom baryon sector, the LHCb Collaboration has reported two excited Λ b states, the Λ b (5912) and the Λ b (5920) [14], with the latter being recently confirmed by the CDF Collaboration [15]. In the charmed baryon sector, a number of excited states have been confirmed by various experiments, including the Λ c (2595), the Ξ c (2790), the Λ c (2625), and the Ξ c (2815) [16]. The spin parities of the first two states and the last two states are assumed to be 1/2 − and 3/2 − , respectively, according to quark model predictions.The conventional picture is that these states are the orbital excitations of the corresponding ground states. There are, however, different interpretations; namely, they are dynamically generated states from the interactions between the ground-state charmed ...