Learned cardiac control with heart rate biofeedback transfers to emotional reactions

Abstract

Emotions involve subjective feelings, action tendencies and physiological reactions. Earlier findings suggest that biofeedback might provide a way to regulate the physiological components of emotions. The present study investigates if learned heart rate regulation with biofeedback transfers to emotional situations without biofeedback. First, participants learned to decrease heart rate using biofeedback. Then, inter-individual differences in the acquired skill predicted how well they could decrease heart rate reactivity when later exposed to negative arousing pictures without biofeedback. These findings suggest that (i) short lasting biofeedback training improves heart rate regulation and (ii) the learned ability transfers to emotion challenging situations without biofeedback. Thus, heart rate biofeedback training may enable regulation of bodily aspects of emotion also when feedback is not available.

Figure 1. Example of training, pre- and post-test trials.

Figure 2. Heart rate differences in bpm from baseline in the pre- and post-test.

Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals (note that the error bars reflect between and not within subject variance and as such are non-informative for the within subject statistical tests used).

Figure 3. The biofeedback induced skill transfers to emotional challenging conditions with no feedback.

Correlation between the training effect (X-axis) and the pre-post training difference in heart rate (HR) (Y-axis). For the training effect, a more positive value indicates a larger decrease in heart rate when regulating compared to monitor as a function of training. For the pre-post training difference (Y-axis), a more negative value corresponds to a larger decrease in heart rate post- as compared to heart rate pre-training.