Heart rate variability as an index of regulated emotional responding.

The study of individual differences in emotional responding can provide considerable insight into interpersonal dynamics and the etiology of psychopathology. Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is emerging as an objective measure of regulated emotional responding (generating emotional responses of appropriate timing and magnitude). This review provides a theoretical and empirical rationale for the use of HRV as an index of individual differences in regulated emotional responding. Two major theoretical frameworks that articulate the role of HRV in emotional responding are presented, and relevant empirical literature is reviewed. The case is made that HRV is an accessible research tool that can increase the understanding of emotion in social and psychopathological processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

基于心率监测的建筑工人生理疲劳分析

人体在进入疲劳状态时生理参数会发生相应的变化.为了探讨砌砖工人在持续体力劳动作业时心率和心率变异(HRV)对人体生理疲劳的影响,针对疲劳与心率的关系提出评价生理疲劳的数学模型.选取15名健康受试者(男性)在搭建的86 cm平台模拟砌砖工人作业.持续作业30 min进行一次心率变异数据的收集.同时,使用心率传感器对心率进行实时监测.本文采用方差分析、t检验和非线性拟合的方法对疲劳对心率和心率变异的影响进行分析.结果表明,生理疲劳使心率波动程度有显著变化(检验水准α=0.05水平,概率P<0.05),随着生理疲劳程度的加重,人体心率需要更长的时间才能恢复至正常值.受试者HRV并无显著性差异(α=0.05,P>0.05).非线性拟合结果(R²=0.8892)显示,生理疲劳的发展趋势呈现出\     

Gender moderates the relationship between testosterone and marital interaction.

Higher testosterone levels are related to assertiveness and dominance. Given the relevance of those behavioral correlates to spouses' daily transactions, links between testosterone levels and marital interaction were explored among 92 newlywed couples. Marital problem-solving and social support transactions were assessed, and saliva was collected and assayed for testosterone. Whether marital behavior was related to husbands' and wives' testosterone levels was examined. The link between spouses' testosterone and their behavior was contingent on the partner's testosterone levels. Husbands exhibited more adaptive problem-solving behaviors and social support provision when husbands and wives were concordant for lower testosterone levels. In contrast, wives exhibited more adaptive support provision when spouses had discordant testosterone levels such that wives had higher levels and husbands had lower levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neuroticism's importance in understanding the daily life correlates of heart rate variability.

Individual differences in high-frequency heart rate variability (HRV) have been conceptualized in terms of a greater capacity to self-regulate problematic outcomes, but have also been conceptualized in terms of greater moment-to-moment flexibility. From a self-regulation perspective, higher HRV should be inversely correlated with trait neuroticism and problematic daily outcomes. From a flexibility perspective, high HRV should result in more state-like functioning—that is, functioning that is more contextual and less trait-like in nature. In the latter case, HRV and trait neuroticism may interact to predict problematic outcomes such that neuroticism should be a less consequential predictor at higher levels of HRV. The flexibility perspective was systematically supported in a daily experience-sampling protocol. Implications focus on theories of neuroticism and HRV. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic monitoring of the affect-heart rate relationship: A day reconstruction study.

Objective: Prospective studies have linked negative affect with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. This study aims to identify if cardiovascular activity in day-to-day settings is related to affect levels as assessed using the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004). Design: 186 people underwent baseline physiological testing and were monitored naturalistically for an entire day. Multilevel models were the principal analyses used. Main Outcome Measures: We utilized an online day reconstruction survey to produce a continuous account of affect, social interactions, and activity patterns during waking hours. Ambulatory heart rate (HR) was assessed during the same period. Personality, health behavior, consumption, self-reported activity, and baseline physiological characteristics were assessed to isolate the relationships between affect and HR. Results: Negative affect predicted an elevated ambulatory HR and tiredness predicted a lower HR. Associations between negative affectivity and increased cardiovascular reactivity were maintained after taking account of baseline physiological factors, health behavior, and personality. Conclusion: Negative affect in everyday life is a reliable predictor of HR. Combining day reconstruction with psychophysiological and environmental monitoring is a minimally invasive method with promising interdisciplinary relevance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Matters of the variable heart: Respiratory sinus arrhythmia response to marital interaction and associations with marital quality.

Maintenance of relationship quality requires self-regulation of emotion and social behavior, and women often display greater effort in this regard than do men. Furthermore, such efforts can deplete the limited capacity for self-regulation. In recent models of self-regulation, resting level of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, quantified as high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), is an indicator of self-regulatory capacity, whereas transient increases in HF-HRV reflect self-regulatory effort. To test these hypotheses in marriage, 114 young couples completed measures of marital quality and a positive, neutral, or negative initial marital task, preceded and followed by resting baseline assessments of HF-HRV. Couples then discussed a current marital disagreement. Resting HF-HRV was correlated with marital quality, suggesting that capacity for self-regulation is associated with adaptive functioning in close relationships. For women but not men, the negative initial task produced a decrease in resting HF-HRV. This effect was mediated by the husbands' negative affect response to the task and their ratings of wives as controlling and directive. When the subsequent disagreement discussion followed the negative initial task, women displayed increased HF-HRV during the discussion but a decrease when it followed the neutral or positive task. The valence of the initial task had no effect on men's HF-HRV during disagreement. Negative marital interactions can reduce women's resting HF-HRV, with potentially adverse health consequences. Women's reduced health benefit from marriage might reflect the depleting effects on self-regulatory capacity of their greater efforts to manage relationship quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social support at work, heart rate, and cortisol: A self-monitoring study.

This study assessed the influence of work social support on self-monitored heart rate, blood pressure, and salivary cortisol recorded on 3 work days and 2 leisure days from 61 nurses and 32 accountants (40 men, 53 women). Heart rate and blood pressure were higher during the day at work than in the evening or on leisure days. Cortisol was higher on leisure than work days and was lower in the evening than in the day. Low social support at work was associated with elevated heart rate during the daytime and evening of work days, an effect that persisted after controlling for psychological distress, age, sex, smoking, and physical activity. Work social support was not related to cortisol on work days, but on leisure days cortisol was elevated among individuals reporting high social support. There were few differences between men and women, and no important occupational effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Heart rate variability, the autonomic nervous system, and neuroeconomic experiments.

Measuring the activity of the autonomic nervous system may yield insights into individual stress levels. One small, nonintrusive instrument for collecting such data is a high-resolution heart rate monitor that allows measurement of heart rate variability (HRV). This complements brain-scanning methods and increases the number of participants that can be studied simultaneously. Combining HRV data with recorded data on the decisions made in experimental games throws light on how different individuals react in (economic) decision-making situations. This article therefore introduces the HRV measurement method and, using data from an ultimatum bargaining experiment in a laboratory environment, illustrates its application in experimental economic research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing the silver lining: Cognitive reappraisal ability moderates the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms.

Individuals differ in their adjustment to stressful life events, with some exhibiting impaired functioning, including depression, while others exhibit impressive resilience. The present study examined the hypothesis that the ability to deploy a particularly adaptive type of emotion regulation—cognitive reappraisal—may be a protective factor. It expands upon existing research in three ways. First, participants' ability to use reappraisal (cognitive reappraisal ability: CRA) was measured by using a behavioral challenge that assessed changes in experiential and physiological domains, rather than questionnaires. Second, all participants had been exposed to one or more recent stressful life events, a context in which emotion regulation may be particularly important. Third, a community sample of 78 women aged 20 to 60 was recruited, as opposed to undergraduates. Results indicate that, at low levels of stress, participants' CRA was not associated with depressive symptoms. However, at high levels of stress, women with high CRA exhibited less depressive symptoms than those with low CRA, suggesting that CRA may be an important moderator of the link between stress and depressive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Maladaptive perfectionism as an intervening variable between psychological control and adolescent depressive symptoms: A three-wave longitudinal study.

Maladaptive perfectionism has been postulated as an intervening variable between psychologically controlling parenting and adolescent internalizing problems. Although this hypothesis has been confirmed in a number of cross-sectional studies, it has not yet been examined from a longitudinal perspective. Findings from this 3-wave longitudinal study show that parental psychological control (as indexed by parent and adolescent reports) at age 15 years predicted increased levels of maladaptive perfectionism 1 year later. Maladaptive perfectionism, in turn, predicted increased levels of adolescent depressive symptoms again 1 year later and acted as a significant intervening variable between parental psychological control at Time 1 and depressive symptoms at Time 3. Multigroup analyses show that the model tested was consistent across gender for paternal psychological control but not for maternal psychological control. Suggestions for future research are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conflict and collaboration in middle-aged and older couples: II. Cardiovascular reactivity during marital interaction.

Marital strain confers risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), perhaps though cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) to stressful marital interactions. CVR to marital stressors may differ between middle-age and older adults, and types of marital interactions that evoke CVR may also differ across these age groups, as relationship contexts and stressors differ with age. The authors examined cardiovascular responses to a marital conflict discussion and collaborative problem solving in 300 middle-aged and older married couples. Marital conflict evoked greater increases in blood pressure, cardiac output, and cardiac sympathetic activation than did collaboration. Older couples displayed smaller heart rate responses to conflict than did middle-aged couples but larger blood pressure responses to collaboration—especially in older men. These effects were maintained during a posttask recovery period. Women did not display greater CVR than men on any measure or in either interaction context, though they did display greater parasympathetic withdrawal. CVR to marital conflict could contribute to the association of marital strain with CVD for middle-aged and older men and women, but other age-related marital contexts (e.g., collaboration among older couples) may also contribute to this mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hopelessness as a mediator of the association between social support and depressive symptoms: Findings of a study of men with HIV.

Data from a prospective longitudinal study were used to investigate whether hopelessness mediates the association between social support and depression, as hypothesized by L. Y. Abramson, G. I. Metalsky, and L. B. Alloy (1989). Measures of hopelessness, social support, and depression were administered to 103 HIV-infected men and readministered 6 months later. Findings indicated that low baseline social support predicted increases in hopelessness and depression. Increases in hopelessness predicted increases in depression after controlling for baseline social support. Low baseline social support did not predict increased depression when hopelessness was controlled statistically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The informational impact of mood on effort mobilization: A study of cardiovascular and electrodermal responses.

The impact of mood on effort quantified as autonomic adjustments was investigated in an experiment. The authors induced positive versus negative moods with either 1 of 2 mood induction procedures (music versus autobiographical recollection) that differed in the extent of required effort. Then participants performed an achievement task after demand appraisals were made. Results were as predicted. During the mood inductions, autonomic reactivity (systolic blood pressure [SBP], diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance responses) was stronger in the relatively effortful recollection conditions than in the relatively effortless music conditions. Mood valence had no impact here. But in the context of task performance, the authors found (a) mood congruency effects on the demand appraisals that reflected subjectively higher demand in a negative than in a positive mood, and (b) stronger SBP reactivity in a negative mood compared with a positive mood. Furthermore, SBP reactivity during task performance was correlated with achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infant physiological regulation and maternal risks as predictors of dyadic interaction trajectories in families with a preterm infant.

This longitudinal study examined predictors of rates of growth in dyadic interaction quality in children born preterm who did not experience significant neurological findings during neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization. Multiple methods were used to collect data from 120 preterm infants (48% girls, 52% boys) and their mothers. Infant heart rate variability (HRV), gestational age, neonatal health, feeding route, and maternal socioeconomic (SES) risks were assessed at NICU discharge (mean of 36 weeks postconception). Mother–child interactions were observed at 4, 9, 16, and 24 months postterm and analyzed with hierarchical linear modeling. On average, children's quality of play, interest, and attention increased over time while their dysregulation and irritability decreased, whereas average maternal positive affect and involvement declined in quality (ps     

Goal reconstruction and depressive symptoms during the transition to motherhood: Evidence from two cross-lagged longitudinal studies.

Two cross-lagged longitudinal studies were carried out to investigate the extent to which the adjustment of personal goals to match the particular stage-specific demands of the transition to motherhood has consequences for women's depressive symptoms. In Study 1, 348 women filled out a revised version of Little's (1983) Personal Project Analysis and a revised version of Beck's Depression Inventory (A. T. Beck, C. H. Ward, M. Mendelsohn, L. Mock, & J. Erlaugh, 1961) 4 times: during early pregnancy, 1 month before childbirth, 3 months after childbirth, and 2 years after childbirth. In Study 2, 140 women who reported high levels of fear of childbirth filled out identical measures during early pregnancy, 1 month before childbirth, and 3 months after childbirth. The results showed that an increase in family-related goals during pregnancy and after the birth of the child predicted a decline in women's depressive symptoms. By contrast, an increase in self-focused goals predicted an increase in women's depressive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Ambulatory blood pressure and heart rate in healthy male paramedics during a workday and a nonworkday": Erratum.

Reports an error in "Ambulatory blood pressure and heart rate in healthy male paramedics during a workday and a nonworkday" by Iris B. Goldstein, Larry D. Jamner and David Shapiro (Health Psychology, 1992, Vol 11[1], 48-54). On page 52, the sentence "For example, the paramedics stood 16.44 times more while home than while at the station" should read "For example, the paramedics stood more while home than while at the station." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1992-29445-001.) Compared ambulatory blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) in 30 White male paramedics (aged 20-43 yrs) during a 24-hr workday and a 24-hr nonworkday. During the 24-hr period as a whole, there were no BP differences between the workday and the nonworkday, but HR was higher during the nonworkday than during the workday. Systolic BP (SBP) recorded in the ambulance on the workday was elevated 9.8 mm Hg, compared with SBP recorded in a car on the nonworkday; it was also 7.2 mm Hg higher at the scene of an accident and at the hospital than during nonworkday activities. Ratings of moods in diaries indicated that paramedics felt more unhappiness, stress, and sadness and less feelings of pleasantness at work than at home. Rather than being elevated for the entire 24-hr period, work BP seemed to reflect the relatively high stress associated with specific situations in the work of a paramedic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived social isolation makes me sad: 5-year cross-lagged analyses of loneliness and depressive symptomatology in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study.

We present evidence from a 5-year longitudinal study for the prospective associations between loneliness and depressive symptoms in a population-based, ethnically diverse sample of 229 men and women who were 50–68 years old at study onset. Cross-lagged panel models were used in which the criterion variables were loneliness and depressive symptoms, considered simultaneously. We used variations on this model to evaluate the possible effects of gender, ethnicity, education, physical functioning, medications, social network size, neuroticism, stressful life events, perceived stress, and social support on the observed associations between loneliness and depressive symptoms. Cross-lagged analyses indicated that loneliness predicted subsequent changes in depressive symptomatology, but not vice versa, and that this temporal association was not attributable to demographic variables, objective social isolation, dispositional negativity, stress, or social support. The importance of distinguishing between loneliness and depressive symptoms and the implications for loneliness and depressive symptomatology in older adults are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative attributional style as a moderator of the link between perfectionism and depressive symptoms: Preliminary evidence for an integrative model.

An integrative model involving perfectionism and negative attributional style as predictors of depressive symptoms was proposed and tested in 222 college students. Beyond the expected additive influences of the 2 predictors in the prediction of dysphoria, negative attributional style was also hypothesized to moderate the link between perfectionism and depressive symptoms. As theorized, results indicated that dimensions of perfectionism (P. Hewitt & G. Flett, 1991b) predicted depressive symptoms (2 months later) and that a negative attributional style added incremental validity to these predictions. Moreover, consistent with the proposed model, the Perfectionism?×?Negative Attributional Style interaction was found to further augment the prediction of depressive symptoms. These findings are taken to offer preliminary support for the proposed model. Some implications for future studies are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory and depressive symptoms are dynamically linked among married couples: Longitudinal evidence from the AHEAD study.

This study examined dyadic interrelations between episodic memory and depressive symptom trajectories of change in old and advanced old age. The authors applied dynamic models to 10-year incomplete longitudinal data of initially 1,599 married couples from the study of Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (Mage = 75 years at Time 1). The authors found domain-specific lead–lag associations (time lags of 2 years) among wives and husbands as well as between spouses. For memory, better performance among husbands protected against subsequent memory decline among wives, with no evidence of a directed effect in the other direction. For depressive symptoms, wives’ scores predicted subsequent depression increase and memory decline among husbands. Possible individual covariates (age, education, functional limitations) and spousal covariates (length of marriage, number of children, and whether the couple remained intact over the study period) did not account for differential lead–lag associations. The findings of antecedent–consequent relations between wives and husbands are consistent with life-span notions that individual development both influences and is influenced by contextual factors such as close social relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioning-specific reflex modification of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response and heart rate: Behavioral rules, neural substrates, and potential applications to posttraumatic stress disorder.

Interest in classical conditioning is usually focused on anticipatory responses to a stimulus associated with a significant event, and it is assumed that responses to the event itself are reflexive, involuntary, and relatively invariant. However, there is compelling evidence that both the rabbit nictitating membrane response (NMR) and heart rate response (HR), well-known reflexive reactions to aversive events, can change quite dramatically as a function of learning when measured in the absence of the conditioned stimulus. In the case of NMR conditioning, a simple blink is transformed into a larger and more complex response. For HR conditioning, reflexive heart rate acceleration can actually change to heart rate deceleration. In both cases, the reflex comes to resemble the conditioned response and follows some of the same behavioral laws. This change in response to the aversive event itself or weaker forms of that event is called conditioning-specific reflex modification (CRM). CRM may force us to reevaluate the behavioral and neural consequences of classical conditioning and may have important consequences for the treatment of conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)