Resting high frequency heart rate variability is not associated with the recognition of emotional facial expressions in healthy human adults

Abstract

This study explores whether the myelinated vagal connection between the heart and the brain is involved in emotion recognition. The Polyvagal theory postulates that the activity of the myelinated vagus nerve underlies socio-emotional skills. It has been proposed that the perception of emotions could be one of this skills dependent on heart-brain interactions. However, this assumption was differently supported by diverging results suggesting that it could be related to confounded factors. In the current study, we recorded the resting state vagal activity (reflected by High Frequency Heart Rate Variability, HF-HRV) of 77 (68 suitable for analysis) healthy human adults and measured their ability to identify dynamic emotional facial expressions. Results show that HF-HRV is not related to the recognition of emotional facial expressions in healthy human adults. We discuss this result in the frameworks of the polyvagal theory and the neurovisceral integration model.

Diet predicts the conduct of animal testing, but inconclusive results on the role of personality, heart rate variability, and lab-animal objectification

“…Next, participants had to equip themselves with electrodes following prior instructions and a schema stuck on a mirror. Once equipped, participants sat at a desk in front of a television, with knees at a 90° angle and arms resting on the desk, and they had to watch a 5-minute soundless video clip to reach a quiet state (see Beffara et al, 2016). Then, participants listened to a 6minute neutral audio extract presenting the first part of the giraffe's Wikipedia page (i.e., size, height, alimentation, Bertels et al, 2014) and we recorded baseline-HRV at this moment.…”

The Heart in the Mind: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Association Between Theory of Mind and Cardiac Vagal Tone

“…It has been reported that the RMET captures ToM deficits shown by people with ASD more than other tests do (Peterson and Slaughter, 2009) because it requires not only the identification of primary emotions from facial expression but also the recognition of mental states from a specific portion of the face. In fact, the understanding of inner states is more complex than the recognition of primary emotions, which has been more deeply investigated in relation to the vagal modulation of the heart (Bal et al, 2010;Park et al, 2012;Quintana et al, 2012;Beffara et al, 2016b;Lischke et al, 2017).…”