Characterization of doctor-patient communication using heartbeat nonlinear dynamics: A preliminary study using Lagged Poincaré Plots

A Case for the Interspecies Transfer of Emotions: A Preliminary Investigation on How Humans Odors Modify Reactions of the Autonomic Nervous System in Horses

We examined the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activity of horses in response to human body odors (BOs) produced under happy and fear states. The ANS response of horses was analyzed in terms of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features extracted in the frequency domain. Our results revealed that human BOs induce sympathetic and parasympathetic changes and stimulate horses emotionally, suggesting interspecies transfer of emotions via BOs. These preliminary findings open the way to measure changes in horse's ANS dynamics in response to human internal states via human BOs, and allow us to better understand unexpected animal behavior that could compromise human-horse interaction. Moreover, it becomes possible to design more effective strategies to manage animals across a range of situations in which a strict humananimal interaction is required, such as the well known Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT).

Cardiovascular assessment of supportive doctor-patient communication using multi-scale and multi-lag analysis of heartbeat dynamics

Emphatic doctor-patient communication has been associated with improved psycho-physiological well-being involving cardiovascular and neuroendocrine responses. Nevertheless, a comprehensive assessment of heartbeat linear and nonlinear dynamics throughout the communication of a life-threatening disease has not been performed yet. To this extent, we studied linear heartbeat dynamics through the extraction of time-frequency domain measurements, as well as heartbeat nonlinear and complex dynamics through novel approaches to compute multi-scale and multi-lag series analyses: namely, the multi-scale distribution entropy and lagged Poincaré plot symbolic analysis. Heart rate variability series were recorded from 54 healthy female subjects who were blind to the aim of the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups: 27 subjects watched a video where an oncologist discloses the diagnosis of a cancer metastasis to a patient, whereas the remaining 27 watched the same video including four additional supportive comments by the clinician. Considering differences between the beginning and the end of each communication video, results from non-parametric Wilcoxon tests demonstrated that, at a group level, significant differences occurred in heartbeat linear and nonlinear dynamics, with lower complexity during nonsupportive communication. Furthermore, a support vector machine algorithm, validated using a leave-one-subject-out procedure, was able to discern the supportive experience at a single-subject level with an accuracy of 83.33% when nonlinear features were considered, dropping to 51.85% when using standard HRV features only. In conclusion, heartbeat nonlinear and complex dynamics can be a viable tool for the psycho-physiological evaluation of supportive doctor-patient communication. Graphical Abstract Scheme of the three main stages of the study: signal acquisition during doctor-patient communication, ECG signal processing and pattern recognition results.