The goal of this study was to investigate whether anxiety during pregnancy can be linked with the autonomic nervous system (ANS) via different heart rate variability (HRV) parameters. More than 100 pregnant women were included and underwent 24h ECG monitoring including a stress test and the state trait anxiety inventory (STAI) questionnaire, dividing them in a low, medium or high anxiety group. Standard time and frequency domain and nonlinear HRV parameters were calculated to describe self-similarity, complexity and chaotic signatures. Almost all HRV parameters were negatively correlated with the anxiety level, though not statistically significant, except the chaos level. Positive correlations were found for detrended fluctuation analysis and sympathetic activity parameters. Most of the significant between-group differences were found between the low and medium anxiety groups. To conclude, the ANS modulation is slightly influenced by the anxiety level, but not as strongly as hypothesized before.

Although the association between teacher-student relations, teacher emotions, and burnout has been proven on a general level, we do not know the exact processes underlying these associations. Recently there has been a call for intra-individual process measures that assess what happens from moment-to-moment in class in order to better understand inter-individual differences in emotions and burnout between teachers. This paper explored the use of process measures of teachers’ heart rate and their interpersonal behavior during teaching. Our aim was to illustrate different ways of analyzing and combining physiological and observational time-series data and to explore their potential for understanding between-teacher differences. In this illustration, we focused on two teachers who represented contrasting cases in terms of their self-reported teaching-related emotions (i.e., anxiety and relaxation) and burnout. We discuss both univariate process analyses (i.e., trend, autocorrelation, stability) as well as state-of-the-art multivariate process analyses (i.e., cross-correlations, dynamic structural equation modeling). Results illustrate how the two teachers differed in the nature of their physiological responses, their interpersonal behavior, and the association between these two process measures over time. Along implications and suggestions for further research, it is discussed how the process-based, dynamic assessment of physiology and interpersonal behavior may ultimately help to understand differences in more general teaching-related emotions and burnout.