Trimodal assessment in agoraphobia research: Further observations on heart rate and synchrony/ desynchrony

This paper reports new observations on heart rate and synchrony/desynchrony in the context of 22 chronic agoraphobic patients' trimodal assessment pre and post exposure treatment. The results corroborated previous reports showing weak and/or inconsistent improvement in heart rate, in contrast to significant improvement in behavioral and subjective response systems. Moreover, the results did not support recent suggestions that heartrate reactivity at pretreatment or global categories of synchrony/dysynchrony at posttreatment have important implications for treatment outcome. However, subtypes of dysynchrony based on the direction of divergence between variables had different implications for the clinical response, indicating that simply dichotomizing patients into synchronizers/desynchronizers may be misleading in addition to being uninformative.This work was supported by Grants MH34177 and MH40141 from the National Institute of Mental Health. Mary Sue Hamann, M.S., assisted in the statistical analyses.