Heart Rate Synchrony in Psychological Counseling

In psychological counseling and psychotherapy, embodied synchrony is considered an important factor related to building rapport and empathy. Recent interpersonal synchrony/coordination studies have addressed this issue, not only at the behavioral level but also at the neurological (brain activity) and physiological (cardiac activity) levels. However, there is little known literature on heart rate synchrony in a psychological counseling context. Therefore, the authors conducted a single exploratory case study to ascertain whether heart rate synchrony was observed in a counseling session and how it related to therapeutic processes and psychological issues.

One male university student (21 years old) and one male clinical psychologist (30 years old) participated in our experiment. The student who was healthy and didn’t have any specific depression or anxiety had a counseling session for 50 minutes. Video data were recorded and two wearable sensors were attached to the chests of both participants to collect heart rate data. The authors applied nonlinear time series analyses, based on a recurrence analysis, to the heart rate data to quantitatively assess heart rate synchrony. A qualitative analysis was also conducted by three clinical psychologists, based on video data from the viewpoints of clinical psychology and psychotherapy.

The results showed that heart rate synchrony between client and therapist was observed and it dynamically changed during the session. It was also suggested that heart rate synchrony could be observed in some clinically important scenes and might reflect the social outcome (building rapport or trust) and relationship (leader-follower). The present study has shown that a recurrence-based analysis can be used to assess complex heart rate data during psychological counseling, as other interpersonal synchrony/coordination studies have done. Further studies using more data from multiple viewpoints are needed to support these findings and to expand the understanding of the relationship between embodied synchrony and psychological issues in the context of psychological counseling and psychotherapy.

Article by Kentaro Kodama, et al, from Japan.

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Image by Paul Gabrinetti, from Flickr-cc.