You look stressed: A pilot study on facial action unit activity in the context of psychosocial stress

Measuring empathic stress - A systematic review of methodology and practical considerations for future research

Aside from stressors that each of us experience directly, we also share the stress of the people around us. Such empathic stress exists on psychological and physiological levels, including subjective, sympathetic, parasympathetic and endocrine activation. The objective of this review is to offer an overview of methodology over the past fifteen years of empathic stress research and derive practical considerations for future research endeavors in the field. We used a keyword search strategy in the databases Web of Science, PsycInfo and PubMed to find empathic stress studies published until December 2023, and included 17 studies into our review. The reviewed laboratory studies provide initial yet consistent evidence for the existence of empathic stress across different populations, in intimate and stranger dyads, with direct and virtual contact, across multiple levels of the stress system, and based on diverse statistical analysis methods. We discuss all findings and derive practical considerations for future empathic stress research. The diversity of methods established provides a solid foundation upon which future studies can expand.

Relational neuroscience: Insights from hyperscanning research

Humans are highly social, typically without this ability requiring noticeable efforts. Yet, such social fluency poses challenges both for the human brain to compute and for scientists to study. Over the last few decades, neuroscientific research of human sociality has witnessed a shift in focus from single-brain analysis to complex dynamics occurring across several brains, posing questions about what these dynamics mean and how they relate to multifaceted behavioural models. We propose the term 'Relational Neuroscience' to collate the interdisciplinary research field devoted to modelling the inter-brain dynamics subserving human connections, spanning from real-time joint experiences to long-term social bonds. Hyperscanning, i.e., simultaneously measuring brain activity from multiple individuals, has proven to be a highly promising technique to investigate inter-brain dynamics. Here, we discuss how hyperscanning can help investigate questions within the field of Relational Neuroscience, considering a variety of subfields, including cooperative interactions in dyads and groups, empathy, attachment and bonding, and developmental neuroscience. While presenting Relational Neuroscience in the light of hyperscanning, our discussion also takes into account behaviour, physiology and endocrinology to properly interpret inter-brain dynamics within social contexts. We consider the strengths but also the limitations and caveats of hyperscanning to answer questions about interacting people. The aim is to provide an integrative framework for future work to build better theories across a variety of contexts and research subfields to model human sociality.

Post-hypnotic safety suggestion improves stress coping with long-lasting effects

Effective coping with acute stress is important to promote mental health and to build stress resilience. Interventions improving stress coping usually require long training periods. In this study, we present a hypnosis-based intervention that produces long-term effects after a single hypnosis session. In that session, we established a post-hypnotic safety suggestion that participants can activate afterwards with a cue, the Jena Safety Anchor. We tested 60 participants in our study who all received the hypnosis session and a stress task. The safety group used the Jena Safety Anchor during acute stress (Trier Social Stress Test, TSST). The control group used a neutral anchor. We measured subjective stress responses via self-reports and physiological stress responses via saliva and blood samples as well as heart rate. One week later, all participants filled in an online survey to measure long-term effects of the post-hypnotic safety suggestion. We found that participants using the Jena Safety Anchor during the TSST reported significantly lower stress compared to the control group. The safety group also reported significantly fewer negative thoughts concerning their TSST performance than the control group during the stress recovery phase and 1 week later. All participants indicated that the Jena Safety Anchor still worked 1 week after its establishment. Suggestibility did not affect the efficacy of the Jena Safety Anchor. Our findings demonstrate that post-hypnotic safety suggestions improve stress coping with long-lasting effects, which makes it a promising intervention to promote mental health and establish stress resilience in just one hypnosis session.