Controlling the emotional heart: heart rate biofeedback improves cardiac control during emotional reactions.

When regulating negative emotional reactions, one goal is to reduce physiological reactions. However, not all regulation strategies succeed in doing that. We tested whether heart rate biofeedback helped participants reduce physiological reactions in response to negative and neutral pictures. When viewing neutral pictures, participants could regulate their heart rate whether the heart rate feedback was real or not. In contrast, when viewing negative pictures, participants could regulate heart rate only when feedback was real. Ratings of task success paralleled heart rate. Participants' general level of anxiety, emotion awareness, or cognitive emotion regulation strategies did not influence the results. Our findings show that accurate online heart rate biofeedback provides an efficient way to down-regulate autonomic physiological reactions when encountering negative stimuli.

Learned cardiac control with heart rate biofeedback transfers to emotional reactions.

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.