Department of Medical Psychology, Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Patient Educ Couns. 2011 Sep;84(3):420-7. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.05.008. Epub 2011 Jun 14.
Medical communication is goal oriented behavior. As such, it can be modeled as a chain of decisions, resulting from cognitive and emotional processes each potentially associated with psychophysiological reactions. Psychophysiological may be helpful to detect small changes in affect or arousal in the course of a consultation that would be difficult to detect by other evaluations of the process, like self-reports. The question is how psychophysiological communication research should be modeled for unraveling in more detail the cognitive, emotional and interpersonal processes which underlie physician and patient behavior.
In the world of medical communication research the six-function model of medical communication reveals a number of fundamental perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes which may evoke psychophysiological responses. The world of psychophysiological research encompasses domains of perception, mental imagery, anticipation and action which all have close connections with fundamental tasks in communication.
This paper discusses ten methodological issues in linking continuous psychophysiological data to verbal and nonverbal events in a medical consultation observed with the Verona coding system.
When linking the two worlds of research, the methodological challenges discussed need to be solved to obtain a valid and reliable application of psychophysiological measures in medical communication research.
医学交流是一种目标导向的行为。因此，它可以被建模为一系列决策，这些决策源自认知和情感过程，每个过程都可能与心理生理反应相关。心理生理学可以帮助检测咨询过程中情感或唤醒的微小变化，而这些变化很难通过其他对过程的评估（如自我报告）来检测。问题是，应该如何对心理生理学交流研究进行建模，以更详细地揭示医生和患者行为背后的认知、情感和人际过程。
在医学交流研究领域，医学交流的六功能模型揭示了一些可能引起心理生理反应的基本感知、认知和情感过程。心理生理学研究领域包括感知、心理意象、预期和行动等领域，这些领域都与沟通中的基本任务密切相关。
本文讨论了将连续的心理生理学数据与使用维罗纳编码系统观察到的医学咨询中的言语和非言语事件联系起来的十个方法学问题。
当将这两个研究领域联系起来时，需要解决所讨论的方法学挑战，以在医学交流研究中获得心理生理学测量的有效和可靠应用。
