Emotion Regulation Difficulties Are Not Always Associated With Negative Outcomes on Women: The Buffer Effect of HRV

Abstract

The Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is regularly associated with depression and trait emotion regulation. However, the interaction between HRV and emotional disturbances is still debated. Only a few studies indicate that HRV moderates the effect of personality traits involved in psychopathological disorders. Since the regulation of emotions is a transdiagnostic factor for most psychological disorders, this study aimed to explore whether HRV moderates the relationship between trait emotion dysregulation and depressive symptoms. We collected data from 148 participants via online questionnaires and HRV measurements at rest. Results show for the 114 female remaining in the study that whereas high emotion regulation difficulties led to higher depressive symptoms severity when resting HRV is low, depressive symptoms remain stable in the same condition but when resting HRV is high. Overall, high resting HRV appears to dampen the consequences of trait emotion regulation difficulties. Further studies are needed to confirm this result, but this suggests that usual response tendencies could be overcome by deactivating or inhibitory processes such as those implied in cognitive flexibility reflected through HRV, according to the neurovisceral integration model.

Emotion Regulation, Parasympathetic Function, and Psychological Well-Being

“…In our sample, vagally mediated HRV was protective when examining depressive symptoms and followed a similar pattern, though the interaction overall was not significant, for perceived stress. These results are consistent with findings from other research groups that higher vagally mediated HRV reduces or eliminates effects of expressive suppression on negative affect during conflict (Geisler and Schröder-Abé, 2015), enables people to spontaneously suppress negative facial expressions in an adaptive and socially appropriate manner when exposed to a negative film clip (Pu et al, 2010), and protects against depressive symptoms for those with emotion regulation difficulties (Fantini-Hauwel et al, 2020). Although meta-analytic results indicate only a small correlation between self-regulation and HRV (Holzman and Bridgett, 2017), these results may be interpreted as an interplay between this bio-marker of one's self-regulatory ability and the frequency participants report using expressive suppression.…”

Difficulties on Emotion Regulation Predict Mental Health of Coronary Heart Disease Patients in Cardiac Rehabilitation but Heart Rate Variability does Not

“…Furthermore, no moderation or mediation effect of HRV on the relationships between emotion regulation and mental health was observed. This is contradictory to previous studies [53,54] showing a protective role of HRV on these relationships. However, all these studies do not rely on clinical populations suffering from cardiac diseases.…”

Reduced heart rate variability and expressive suppression interact to prospectively predict COVID-19 pandemic-related post-traumatic stress symptoms

“…This is in line with previous studies that demonstrated the role of higher HRV levels in protecting individuals who habitually used maladaptive emotion regulation strategies from the development of psychological disorders (e.g. 94 ). This data is relevant because it underlies the importance of combining self-report psychological measures with psychophysiological measures in the assessment of PTSS risk.…”