Augmenting online interpersonal communication with biosignals, often in the form of heart rate sharing, has shown promise in increasing affiliation, feelings of closeness, and intimacy. Increasing empathetic awareness in the professional domain and in the customer interface could benefit both customer and employee satisfaction, but heart rate sharing in this context needs to consider issues around physiological monitoring of employees, appropriate level of intimacy, as well as the productivity outlook. In this study, we explore heart rate sharing at the workplace and study its effects on task performance. Altogether, 124 participants completed a collaborative visual guidance task using a chat box with heart rate visualization. Participants’ feedback about heart rate sharing reveal themes such as a stronger sense of human contact and increased self-reflection, but also raise concerns around unnecessity, intimacy, privacy and negative interpretations. Live heart rate was always measured, but to investigate the effect of heart rate sharing on task performance, half of the customers were told that they were seeing a recording, and half were told that they were seeing the advisor’s live heart beat. We found a negative link between awareness and task performance. We also found that higher ratings of usefulness of the heart rate visualization were associated with increased feelings of closeness. These results reveal that intimacy and privacy issues are particularly important for heart rate sharing in professional contexts, that preference modulates the effects of heart rate sharing on social closeness, and that heart rate sharing may have a negative effect on performance.

Objective: Medical doctors’ empathy is known to support patients’ health status after face-to-face clinical visits. However, the role of doctors’ empathy in chat-based encounters is not yet well understood. This study investigates whether patients’ evaluations of doctors’ empathy are associated with their health perceptions after a meeting at an online clinic and whether experiences of empathy could be enhanced by augmenting an automated anamnesis questionnaire completed before the visit. Methods: A total of 209 adult patients agreed to participate in the study. First 103 patients filled out the regular version of the questionnaire (June–August 2019) and then 106 filled out the augmented version of the online anamnesis questionnaire (August–November 2019). Patients’ perceptions of doctors’ empathy were measured with the Consultation and Relational Empathy questionnaire. Patients’ self-perceived health status, potential confounders, and demographic background information were measured via questionnaires. Results: Patients’ perceptions of doctors’ empathy during a chat-based encounter were associated with patients being less concerned about their symptoms (estimated odds ratios varied between 0.45 and 0.55 depending on the model, p values < .003) and considering their symptoms as less severe (estimated odds ratios = 0.54–0.61, p values < .007), as well as a higher probability of alleviation of symptoms as rated by the patients (estimated odds ratios = 2.16–2.24, p values < .001). Augmenting the anamnesis questionnaire did not affect patient reports on doctors’ overall empathy, but it did have positive effects on specific areas of doctors’ empathy covered by the questionnaire. Conclusions: These results show that patients’ experience of doctors’ empathy not only is important during face-to-face encounters but also supports patients’ perceptions of health when the interaction is text based. The results also encourage further development of means to support patients’ experiences of empathy during online interaction with medical doctors.

In social neuroscience inter-individual neural phase synchrony has become a widely studied phenomenon, and has been linked to a variety of social outcomes. However, the cognitive processes underlying the emergence of this synchrony remain largely unknown. In this study, we used a two-person face-to-face collaborative task to investigate the potential of dispositional empathy—the general tendency of an individual to imagine and experience the feelings and experiences of others—as a driver of inter-individual neural synchrony during collaboration. Electroencephalography from 46 participants was used to examine phase synchrony, measured as circular correlation coefficients, between the two interacting individuals’ brain signals. We found significant inter-brain synchrony in the high alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands. This synchrony was particularly prominent in the inter-brain connectivity measured between central regions and a range of other regions. Furthermore, a specific dimension of dispositional empathy, namely the collaborators’ tendency to transpose themselves imaginatively into the feelings and actions of others, predicted the level of synchrony in the beta and gamma frequency bands. Hence, we demonstrate that dispositional empathy plays a significant role in the emergence of inter-individual neural phase synchrony.