Dynamics and diversity of heart rate responses to a disaster motion picture

Abstract Emotions are dynamic neuropsychophysiological processes that guide behavior and serve as crucial signals during social interactions. Measuring their highly individual temporal dynamics is an unresolved challenge, but the coupling of autonomic and central nervous processes offers a promising approach. We present a feasible approach to study changes in heart rate during emotions and demonstrate a link to empathy. We investigated the interindividual similarity and temporal dynamics of heart rate responses to an emotive motion picture. Forty healthy participants watched “The Impossible” (109 min; Hermida Muniz et al., 2012) while their heart rate was recorded. Interindividual concordance of heart rate responses was analysed using agglomerative hierarchical clustering analyses to distinguish response patterns throughout the movie and during six highly emotive scenes. This revealed multiple response patterns during emotive scenes. Second, we analysed how changes in heart rate are linked to self-reported empathy. We found that the extent of changes in heart rate is positively linked to trait and state empathy. During specific scenes, this relationship was only visible when individuals with homogeneous heart rate response patterns were observed, but not across discordant response patterns. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that heart rate responses to complex social stimuli are not uniform. Therefore, research should favour statistical procedures with the potential to detect interindividual differences. The approach presented in our study allows us to depict interindividual similarity and diversity in emotional autonomic responses and emphasizes the key role of empathy in emotional experiences.