How our hearts beat together: a study on physiological synchronization based on a self-paced joint motor task.

Flory, Stephan; Guglielmini, Sabino; Scholkmann, Felix; Marcar, Valentine L; Wolf, Martin (2023). How our hearts beat together: a study on physiological synchronization based on a self-paced joint motor task. Scientific Reports, 13(1), p. 11987. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/s41598-023-39083-9

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Cardiac physiological synchrony is regarded as an important component of social interaction due to its putative role in prosocial behaviour. Yet, the processes underlying physiological synchrony remain unclear. We aim to investigate these processes. 20 dyads (19 men, 21 women, age range 18-35) engaged in a self-paced interpersonal tapping synchronization task under different levels of tapping synchrony due to blocking of sensory communication channels. Applying wavelet transform coherence analysis, significant increases in heart rate synchronization from baseline to task execution were found with no statistically significant difference across conditions. Furthermore, the control analysis, which assessed synchrony between randomly combined dyads of participants showed no difference from the original dyads' synchrony. We showed that interindividual cardiac physiological synchrony during self-paced synchronized finger tapping resulted from a task-related stimulus equally shared by all individuals. We hypothesize that by applying mental effort to the task, individuals changed into a similar mental state, altering their cardiac regulation. This so-called psychophysiological mode provoked more uniform, less variable fluctuation patterns across all individuals leading to similar heart rate coherence independent of subsequent pairings. With this study, we provide new insights into cardiac physiological synchrony and highlight the importance of appropriate study design and control analysis.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

04 Faculty of Medicine > Medical Education > Institute of Complementary and Integrative Medicine (IKIM)

UniBE Contributor:

Scholkmann, Felix Vishnu

Subjects:

600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health

ISSN:

2045-2322

Publisher:

Nature Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pubmed Import

Date Deposited:

26 Jul 2023 09:41

Last Modified:

27 Jul 2023 15:51

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/s41598-023-39083-9

PubMed ID:

37491507

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/185068

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/185068

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