Operant Conditioning of Heart Rate: Somatic Correlates

Abstract

The relationships between heart rate (HR) and several parameters of somatic activity were evaluated in human subjects when shuck avoidance was made contingent on either increases or decreases in HR. In order to depict any influence of the contingency specific 10 HR, somatic activity was controlled to varying degrees by instructions and the use of non‐contingent control groups. When increases in HR were reinforced, the contingency we found to influence somatic activity but an effect specific to HR was also observed. When decreases in HR were reinforced, there was no evidence that HR were influenced independently of somatic activity. The result are discussed with respect to several current issues.

Dynamics of reactions of nonspecific and somatic activation during biofeedback training

“…The activational shifts regularly appearing during the training, respiratory arrhythmia and, in certain instances, increases in the rate of respiration, heart rate, and intensification of beta-activity, were observed previously by other authors [9,13,14,20,21,25] and are usually explained by these authors by noting the possibility that, in the process of adaptive biocontrol, one learns to regulate not individual visceral parameters (resistance and temperature of the skin, heart rate, arterial pressure, etc) but a systemic reaction including the parameter to be learned. The data we have obtained does not fit within the framework of these explanations.…”

“…There is extensive discussion concerning the degree of participation of voluntary somatic activity [7,9,22] in the regulation of visceral processes and the ratio of conscious to unconscious activity, the role o-f attention, suggestion, and emotional factors [8, i0], etc. involved in processes of adaptive biocontrol [12,20,24]. According to N. Miller~ one of the pioneers of investigations in the area of adaptive biocontrol, this method is a variety of instrumental training [15,16]; however, this idea has not received thorough experimental development.…”

Attenuation of the bidirectional effects of chlordiazepoxide and FG 7142 on conditioned response suppression and associated cardiovascular reactivity by loss of cortical cholinergic inputs

“…Although the typical response of rats to a conditioned aversive stimulus is cardioacceleration (e.g., Hunt et al 1994;Iwata and LeDoux 1988;Kurtz and Campbell 1994), deceleratory responses have been reported, especially in association with somatic "freezing" (Fitzgerald et al 1985;Hunt et al 1997). In view of the profound behavioral suppression to the CS in both control and lesion groups, cardiac deceleration to this stimulus may have been confounded with reduced somatomotor activity (Obrist et al 1975;Black and de Toledo 1972) and/or coactivation of the parasympathetic system (Iwata and LeDoux 1988;Hunt et al 1997). In contrast to responses observed to the CS, control animals exhibited the expected cardioacceleration during presentation of the contextual stimulus, despite the associated behavioral suppression.…”

Not All Competitions Come to Harm! Competitive Biofeedback to Increase Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia in Managers

“…Intriguingly, competition during biofeedback (BF) can be used to highlight the effects of competition on the same physiological response that is going to be changed ( Stegagno and Vaitl, 1979 ). BF is a well-known autoregulation procedure that allows the individual to control, through feedback, his/her own physiological functions, including the cardiovascular functions ( Obrist et al, 1975 ; Williamson and Blanchard, 1979 ; Schwartz and Andrasik, 2017 ). BF can be used as a procedure to exploit competition as a motivational factor for challenging individuals to change their physiological activity ( Stegagno and Vaitl, 1979 ; Stern and Elder, 1982 ; Shahidi and Salmon, 1992 ; Palomba and Stegagno, 1993 ).…”