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.
Full access: http://mrw.so/518zfl
Image by Paul Gabrinetti, from
Flickr-cc.
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