CHANGES IN THE STATE OF MEDICAL STUDENTS DURING PARTICIPATION IN A PERCEPTUAL EXPERIMENT

Abstract

"The goal of this work was to study the changes in the psychological, psychophysiological, and physiological state of the subjects - medical students of junior and senior courses before and after participating in a perceptual experiment. We have developed a comprehensive methodological approach that allows us to evaluate the interaction of medical students with children with atypical development (AD). The approach includes an assessment of the psychophysiological and psychological state of the study participants, conducting a perceptual study, recording and analyzing the mimic expression and speech of the subjects. During the perceptual experiment, students are presented with test sequences containing speech signals of children with typical development (TD) and AD (Down syndrome; autism spectrum disorders) and a video test containing behavioral patterns of AD children. During the perceptual experiment, a parallel video recording of the behavior of the auditors is carried out, which makes it possible to verify their answers using the specialized software FaceReader, which determines the true emotional state of a person by his facial expression. After the perceptual experiment, the auditors answer questions regarding their relationship to the listened speech signals. The psychoemotional status of students is determined before and after the experiment using a battery of psychological tests. The change in the state of the subjects was determined by instrumental spectrographic analysis of their speech recorded before and after participating in the experiment. The speech material was analyzed using the Cool Edit Pro audio editor. The study participants were 40 students of the St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University - adult native speakers of the Russian language. The subjects were divided into 2 groups. The first group consisted of students of the first and second courses; the second group - students of the fifth and sixth courses. In the course of the work, original data were obtained on the acoustic characteristics of speech, reflecting the state of medical students before and after participating in a perceptual experiment aimed at recognizing the type of child development. According to the results of psychological testing, it was found that the students of the second group experienced less emotional tension before the start of the study, compared with the subjects of the first group. Relationships between the psychological parameters of the subjects and the success of the tasks of the perceptual experiment were determined. The work is financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project 19–78–00057)."