Learned cardiac control with heart rate biofeedback transfers to emotional reactions

PLoS One. 2013 Jul 23;8(7):e70004. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070004. Print 2013.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Arousal
  • Biofeedback, Psychology / physiology*
  • Emotions*
  • Female
  • Heart Rate / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Learning*
  • Male
  • Stress, Psychological
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

The project was founded by the Swedish Research Council. Gilles Pourtois was supported by a grant from the European Research Council (Starting Grant #200758) and by the Belgian Science Policy, Interuniversity Attraction Poles program (P7/11) The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.