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Lab News
Summer Research in the Lab
August 2021: This summer, we had three student researchers in our lab who all did amazing work! Bri Vigorito joined the lab this summer through the Barnard Summer Research Institute, and Talia Rosen and Zoe Zeltner conducted independent studies. Take a look at two videos that Bri made, as well as a post she wrote for the admissions office, about what it's like to do research in the lab.
New Paper in Social Science and Medicine
July 2021: Do doctors and patients exhibit similarity in their physiological responses
during interactions with one another? Our new paper, now published in Social Science and Medicine, suggests that they do. In this research, we measured the autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses of oncologists and patients during their consultations with each other to examine "physiological linkage." We found that patients showed physiological linkage to their doctors—meaning that doctors’ physiological responses positively predicted patients’ responses at a subsequent time interval—when their relationships spanned three to eight consultations.
This work shows that, by "influencing" patients’ physiological responses on a moment-to-moment basis, doctors may have even more influence over patients’ physiology than previously known. Please see the full paper here for more details on this research!
New Paper in Psychoneuroendocrinology
June 2021: Does revealing more about oneself during a conversation with a new acquaintance predict greater similarity in cortisol changes with that person? Our new research in Psychoneuroendocrinology suggests that it does. In this research, pairs of new acquaintances asked each other personal questions. We measured self-disclosure—how much people revealed personal information to one another—while they were talking, and we also measured people's cortisol responses before and after the conversations. We found that self-disclosure was associated with more similarity in cortisol reactivity from before to after the conversation between dyad members.
This research demonstrates one social process associated with cortisol similarity between people during early relationship formation and, in doing so, reveals a new process through which our physiological functioning may become tied to those around us—even those we have just met. For more details on this work, please see the paper here!
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