How Does Surgeons' Autonomic Physiology Vary Intraoperatively?: A Real-time Study of Cardiac Reactivity.

Objective: To measure the physiological responses of surgical team members under varying levels of intraoperative risk.

Background: Measurement of intraoperative physiological responses provides insight into how operation complexity, phase of surgery, and surgeon seniority impact stress.

Methods: Autonomic nervous system responses (interbeat intervals, IBIs) were measured continuously during different surgical operations of various complexity.

The Temporal Dynamics of Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Between Students and Teachers Predict Learning Outcomes.

Much of human learning happens through interaction with other people, but little is known about how this process is reflected in the brains of students and teachers. Here, we concurrently recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data from nine groups, each of which contained four students and a teacher. All participants were young adults from the northeast United States.

Oxytocin increases physiological linkage during group therapy for methamphetamine use disorder: a randomized clinical trial.

Patients and psychotherapists often exhibit behavioral, psychological, and physiological similarity. Here, we test whether oxytocin-a neuropeptide that can enhance expressivity and social perception-influences time-lagged "linkage" of autonomic nervous system responses among participants and facilitators during group therapy. Physiological linkage estimates (n = 949) were created from ten cohorts, each with two facilitators (n = 5) and four to six participants (n = 48), over six weekly sessions of group therapy for methamphetamine use disorder.

Morning brain: real-world neural evidence that high school class times matter.

Researchers, parents and educators consistently observe a stark mismatch between biologically preferred and socially imposed sleep-wake hours in adolescents, fueling debate about high school start times. We contribute neural evidence to this debate with electroencephalogram data collected from high school students during their regular morning, mid-morning and afternoon classes. Overall, student alpha power was lower when class content was taught via videos than through lectures.

Emotional Empathy in the Social Regulation of Distress: A Dyadic Approach.

Although research suggests distressed individuals benefit from others' empathy, it is unclear how an individual's level of empathy influences dyadic responses during emotional situations. In the current study, female participants ( = 140; 70 dyads) were paired with a stranger. One member of each dyad (the experiencer) was randomly assigned to undergo a stressful task and disclose negative personal experiences to their partner (the listener).

Physiological linkage among successful high-status women in international teams.

In contemporary society, decisions are often made by teams whose members represent different nationalities and genders. In the current work, participants from 55 countries formed groups of 3 to 4 people to select one of the 5 firms in a mock firm search. In all groups, one woman was randomly assigned to have higher status than her groupmates; she was also surreptitiously instructed to persuade her group to select one (randomly assigned) firm.

Keep it to yourself? Parent emotion suppression influences physiological linkage and interaction behavior.

Parents can influence children's emotional responses through direct and subtle behavior. In this study we examined how parents' acute stress responses might be transmitted to their 7- to 11-year-old children and how parental emotional suppression would affect parents' and children's physiological responses and behavior. Parents and their children ( = 214; = 107; 47% fathers) completed a laboratory visit where we initially separated the parents and children and subjected the parent to a standardized laboratory stressor that reliably activates the body's primary stress systems.

Controlling the uncontrolled: Are there incidental experimenter effects on physiologic responding?

The degree to which experimenters shape participant behavior has long been of interest in experimental social science research. Here, we extend this question to the domain of peripheral psychophysiology, where experimenters often have direct, physical contact with participants, yet researchers do not consistently test for their influence. We describe analytic tools for examining experimenter effects in peripheral physiology.

Bringing close others to the emergency department for an acute coronary event is associated with increased patient perception of threat.

Objective: Relationship quality is one of the most consistent psychosocial predictors of physical and mental health. Yet, little research examines relationship types or support within the immediate context of acute health events. We tested the unexplored role that close others play in patients' experience of threat during evaluation for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in the Emergency Department (ED), as well as the indirect effect of close others on ACS-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Physiological linkage to an interaction partner is negatively associated with stability in sympathetic nervous system responding.

Recent work has demonstrated that people can be influenced by the physiological states of their interaction partners, showing physiological linkage to them from one moment to the next. In a study of unacquainted dyads who interacted for 30 min (n = 47), we examine the novel question: Are people who show physiological linkage to their partners in sympathetic nervous system responding also less stable in their own responses? Understanding this relationship has important implications for how social relationships impact affective functioning and health. Results using multilevel modeling demonstrated that the within-person correlation between linkage and stability was negative-the more dyad members were physiologically influenced by their interaction partners, the less stable they were in their own physiological responding.

It takes two to tango: A dyadic approach to understanding the medication dialogue in patient-provider relationships.

Objective: To describe typologies of dyadic communication exchanges between primary care providers and their hypertensive patients about prescribed antihypertensive medications.

Methods: Qualitative analysis of 94 audiotaped patient-provider encounters, using grounded theory methodology.

Results: Four types of dyadic exchanges were identified: Interactive (53% of interactions), divergent-traditional (24% of interactions), convergent-traditional (17% of interactions) and disconnected (6% of interactions).

Measuring physiological influence in dyads: A guide to designing, implementing, and analyzing dyadic physiological studies.

Scholars across domains in psychology, physiology, and neuroscience have long been interested in the study of shared physiological experiences between people. Recent technological and analytic advances allow researchers to examine new questions about how shared physiological experiences occur. Yet comprehensive guides that address the theoretical, methodological, and analytic components of studying these processes are lacking.

Contagious Anxiety: Anxious European Americans Can Transmit Their Physiological Reactivity to African Americans.

During interracial encounters, well-intentioned European Americans sometimes engage in subtle displays of anxiety, which can be interpreted as signs of racial bias by African American partners. In the present research, same-race and cross-race stranger dyads ( N = 123) engaged in getting-acquainted tasks, during which measures of sympathetic nervous system responses (preejection period, PEP) and heart rate variability were continuously collected. PEP scores showed that African American partners had stronger physiological linkage to European American partners who evidenced greater anxiety-greater cortisol reactivity, behavioral tension, and self-reported discomfort-which suggests greater physiological responsiveness to momentary changes in partners' affective states when those partners were anxious.

Affect contagion between mothers and infants: Examining valence and touch.

Mothers and their babies represent one of the closest dyadic units and thus provide a powerful paradigm to examine how affective states are shared, and result in, synchronized physiologic responses between two people. We recruited mothers and their 12- to 14-month-old infants (Ndyads = 98) to complete a lab study in which mothers were initially separated from their infants and assigned to either a low-arousal positive/relaxation condition, intended to elicit parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) reactivity, or a high-arousal negative/stress task, intended to elicit sympathetic nervous system (SNS) reactivity. Upon reunion, infants were placed either on their mothers' laps (touch condition) or in a high chair next to the mother (no-touch condition).

Color-Blind and Multicultural Strategies in Medical Settings.

Recently, scholars have called for research that systematically examines the role of race and culture in shaping communication during racially discordant practitioner-patient interactions (i.e., patient and physician from different racial ethnic groups).

Ideological Differences in Anchoring and Adjustment During Social Inferences.

Recent research has demonstrated that conservatives perceive greater similarity to political ingroup members than do liberals. In two studies, we draw from a framework of "anchoring and adjustment" to understand why liberals and conservatives differ in their perceptions of ingroup similarity. Results indicate that when participants made judgments under time pressure, liberals and conservatives did not differ in assuming ingroup similarity.

Government instability shifts skin tone representations of and intentions to vote for political candidates.

Does government stability shift the way White and Black Americans represent and make voting decisions about political candidates? Participants judged how representative lightened, darkened, and unaltered photographs were of a racially ambiguous candidate ostensibly running for political office (Studies 1-3). When the governmental system was presented as stable, White participants who shared (vs. did not share) the candidate's political beliefs rated a lightened photo as more representative of the candidate, and Black participants who shared (vs.

Conservatives negatively evaluate counterstereotypical people to maintain a sense of certainty.

People frequently use physical appearance stereotypes to categorize individuals when their group membership is not directly observable. Recent research indicates that political conservatives tend to use such stereotypes more than liberals do because they express a greater desire for certainty and order. In the present research, we found that conservatives were also more likely to negatively evaluate and distribute fewer economic resources to people who deviate from the stereotypes of their group.

Anxiety perseverance in intergroup interaction: When incidental explanations backfire.

Intergroup interactions are often anxiety provoking, and this can lead members of both majority and minority groups to avoid contact. Whereas negative consequences of experiencing intergroup anxiety are well documented, the role of perceived anxiety has received substantially less theoretical and empirical attention. We demonstrate in 3 experiments that the perception of anxiety in others can undermine intergroup interactions even when the anxiety can be attributed to a source that is unrelated to the interaction.

Racial attitudes and visual cues in political judgments: support for Obama during the 2008 presidential election.

The present longitudinal study examined the complex role of race-including racial attitudes and visual representations of race-in White Americans' responses to Obama during the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

"Ditto Heads": Do Conservatives Perceive Greater Consensus Within Their Ranks Than Liberals?

In three studies, we examined (a) whether conservatives possess a stronger desire to share reality than liberals and are therefore more likely to perceive consensus with politically like-minded others even for non-political judgments and, if so, (b) whether motivated perceptions of consensus would give conservatives an edge in progressing toward collective goals. In Study 1, participants estimated ingroup consensus on non-political judgments. Conservatives perceived more ingroup consensus than liberals, regardless of the amount of actual consensus.

A little similarity goes a long way: the effects of peripheral but self-revealing similarities on improving and sustaining interracial relationships.

Integrating theory on close relationships and intergroup relations, we construct a manipulation of similarity that we demonstrate can improve interracial interactions across different settings. We find that manipulating perceptions of similarity on self-revealing attributes that are peripheral to the interaction improves interactions in cross-race dyads and racially diverse task groups. In a getting-acquainted context, we demonstrate that the belief that one's different-race partner is similar to oneself on self-revealing, peripheral attributes leads to less anticipatory anxiety than the belief that one's partner is similar on peripheral, nonself-revealing attributes.

Lost in the categorical shuffle: evidence for the social non-prototypicality of black women.

The white male norm hypothesis (Zárate & Smith, 1990) posits that White men's race and gender go overlooked as a result of their prototypical social statuses. In contrast, the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) posits that people with membership in multiple subordinate social groups experience social invisibility as a result of their non-prototypical social statuses. The present research reconciles these contradictory theories and provides empirical support for the core assumption of the intersectional invisibility hypothesis-that intersectional targets are non-prototypical within their race and gender ingroups.