A new approach for the quantification of synchrony of multivariate non-stationary psychophysiological variables during emotion eliciting stimuli

Abstract

Emotion eliciting situations are accompanied by changes of multiple variables associated with subjective, physiological and behavioral responses. The quantification of the overall simultaneous synchrony of psychophysiological reactions plays a major role in emotion theories and has received increased attention in recent years. From a psychometric perspective, the reactions represent multivariate non-stationary intra-individual time series. In this paper, a new time-frequency based latent variable approach for the quantification of the synchrony of the responses is presented. The approach is applied to empirical data, collected during an emotion eliciting situation. The results are compared with a complementary inter-individual approach of Hsieh et al. (2011). Finally, the proposed approach is discussed in the context of emotion theories, and possible future applications and limitations are provided.

Physicians' psychophysiological stress reaction in medical communication of bad news: A critical literature review

“…could then be applied in order to see what happens on the physiological level. In this respect, it might be interesting to investigate whether there is a physiological component to empathy and whether the physician's expressions of empathy are synchronised with the physiological responses occurring between the physician and the patient (Kelava et al, 2014;Marci and Orr, 2006).…”

Interpersonal Physiological Synchrony for Detecting Moments of Connection in Persons With Dementia: A Pilot Study

“…It has become a principal focus in social psychophysiology as an objective measure of the strength of interpersonal interactions across various social contexts (Palumbo et al, 2017 ; Helm et al, 2018 ). Physiological synchrony has been successfully used to characterize the relational dynamics of romantic couples (McAssey et al, 2013 ; Chatel-Goldman et al, 2014 ; Karvonen et al, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2016 ; Chaspari et al, 2017a , b ; Timmons et al, 2017 ; Corner et al, 2019 ); friends and strangers (Slovák et al, 2014 ; Danyluck and Page-Gould, 2019 ; Bizzego et al, 2020 ); therapist-patient dyads (Marci and Orr, 2006 ; Marci et al, 2007 ; Tschacher and Meier, 2020 ); students working in groups (Guastello et al, 2006 ; Kelava et al, 2015 ; Mønster et al, 2016 ; Ahonen et al, 2018 ; Haataja et al, 2018 ; Malmberg et al, 2019 ); and parent-child dyads (Baker et al, 2015 ; Bernard et al, 2017 ; Bell, 2020 ; Samadani et al, 2021 ). The patterns of physiological linkages across different social contexts provide insight into social factors such as emotion, empathy, influence, conflict, and cooperation, that may not be accessible through self-reports or behavioral observations alone (Blain and McKeever, 2011 ; Thorson et al, 2018 ).…”