Dynamical systems modeling of physiological coregulation in dyadic interactions

In this paper, we used a dynamical systems approach to examine the interrelations of the physiological signals in dyadic interactions. We introduced a system of differential equations developed for dyadic research (Felmlee and Greenberg, 1999) and applied it to time series of heart rate and respiration from individuals in 32 couples. The model included parameters representing self-regulation and coregulation for each individual in the dyad. We applied the model directly to each dyad's data and then examined the distributions of the parameters, and compared such parameters across the three laboratory tasks. In the final step, we explored the associations between the parameter estimates extracted from the physiological data with those parameters from a similar model fitted to daily self-reports of affect. ► Heart rate and respiration of couples can be represented as dynamical systems. ► Each individual in the couple has a self-regulatory and a coregulatory mechanism. ► During an imitation task, participants' respiration coordinated with each other. ► The physiological dynamics are related to dynamics of daily affect.