Autonomic Adaption to Clinical Simulation in Psychology Students: Teaching Applications

Abstract

Simulation is used to facilitate new learning in a variety of situations. One application of simulation could be to help therapists gain therapeutic skills prior to seeing clients. This particular study was interested in measuring changes in stress response by looking at subjective and objective measures of distress (as measured by SUDS, HR, and HRV) over three sessions of simulated therapy. 16 second year psychology students participated in three sessions, and had their HR and HRV measured by Polar watches. Over the three sessions, there was a decrease in perceived distress, as measured by SUDS ratings. During and between sessions, there was inconclusive change in physiological parameters.

Heart and Brain Responses to Real Versus Simulated Chess Games in Trained Chess Players: A Quantitative EEG and HRV Study

“…These results could be relevant for the training of these chess players (unfamiliarized with playing chess with computers), indicating that the focused attention, and in consequence the quality of the training, may be higher using real environments. Since simulation environments are frequently used as training in other sports or fields [42][43][44], future studies should use the EEG or the HRV in order to test how real the simulation environments are. Moreover, the study of the effectiveness of computer-based and real environment trainings in chess players would be interesting.…”

Autonomic Profile, Physical Activity, Body Mass Index and Academic Performance of School Students

“…Another remarkable aspect is that elementary students is a sensitive population to suffer increased anxiety levels because they present a lack of self-control or fewer tools to face this kind of stressful situations, such as evaluation periods, than other educational stages such as secondary or higher education [31][32][33]. Previous studies conducted in higher education stage showed how the psychological profile of students is an important variable to keep stress under control [34,35], which is essential to reach a correct learning process [36]. The academic environment generates stress that can be detected by the heart rate variability (HRV) measurements [37], being a useful tool to analyze autonomic nervous system dysregulation due to the stress in early educational stages [38].…”

Could academic experience modulate psychophysiological stress response of biomedical sciences students in laboratory?

“…When exposed to a perceived stressor stimuli, HPA axis is activated as consequence of a sympathetic activation, which produces increases in the heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, bronchodilation as well as over-activation of cognitive and metabolic resources [3][4][5]. This response has been found either in applied military combat, in where there is a life perceived risk, thus an acute stressful stimuli [6], showing increases in lactate, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, muscular strength, salivary cortisol and blood glucose levels [7], and in clinical evaluations in undergraduate students [8], clinical stays or prior to their first written exams in the course [9][10][11][12][13].Previous studies showed how acute stress produces a reduction in blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, which means a decrease in oxygen and nutrients, triggering a decrease of the effectiveness of the executive functions associated [3,14], affecting brain regions as the hippocampus, leading to concentration difficulties and acutely reducing memory capability [15] either working and operative memory [15][16][17][18], decision making [16] and contributing to irritability, anxiety, loss of self-confidence and worriedness [19,20].…”