Heart Rate Variability and Cardiac Vagal Tone in Psychophysiological Research - Recommendations for Experiment Planning, Data Analysis, and Data Reporting.

Sylvain Laborde,Emma Mosley,Julian F Thayer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00213

Abstract

Psychophysiological research integrating heart rate variability (HRV) has increased during the last two decades, particularly given the fact that HRV is able to index cardiac vagal tone. Cardiac vagal tone, which represents the contribution of the parasympathetic nervous system to cardiac regulation, is acknowledged to be linked with many phenomena relevant for psychophysiological research, including self-regulation at the cognitive, emotional, social, and health levels. The ease of HRV collection and measurement coupled with the fact it is relatively affordable, non-invasive and pain free makes it widely accessible to many researchers. This ease of access should not obscure the difficulty of interpretation of HRV findings that can be easily misconstrued, however, this can be controlled to some extent through correct methodological processes. Standards of measurement were developed two decades ago by a Task Force within HRV research, and recent reviews updated several aspects of the Task Force paper. However, many methodological aspects related to HRV in psychophysiological research have to be considered if one aims to be able to draw sound conclusions, which makes it difficult to interpret findings and to compare results across laboratories. Those methodological issues have mainly been discussed in separate outlets, making difficult to get a grasp on them, and thus this paper aims to address this issue. It will help to provide psychophysiological researchers with recommendations and practical advice concerning experimental designs, data analysis, and data reporting. This will ensure that researchers starting a project with HRV and cardiac vagal tone are well informed regarding methodological considerations in order for their findings to contribute to knowledge advancement in their field.

Highlights

Thanks to more accessible technology and since the establishment of standards by the Task Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology two decades ago (Malik, 1996), followed by concurring guidelines from the Society for Psychophysiological Research (Berntson et al, 1997), heart rate variability (HRV), representing the change in the time interval between successive heartbeats, became a strong focus of psychophysiological research
In this paper we refer to cardiac vagal tone as assessed by HRV measurement
If researchers choose to conduct a psychophysiological research project based on one of the five theories we presented in section “HRV in Psychophysiological Research: A Focus on Vagal Tone,” they will be interested in assessing vagal tone

Summary

Introduction

Thanks to more accessible technology (hardware and software) and since the establishment of standards by the Task Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology two decades ago (Malik, 1996), followed by concurring guidelines from the Society for Psychophysiological Research (Berntson et al, 1997), heart rate variability (HRV), representing the change in the time interval between successive heartbeats (see Figure 1), became a strong focus of psychophysiological research This is due to the fact that HRV provides an index of the parasympathetic nervous system (Malik, 1996; Chapleau and Sabharwal, 2011). Even if we refer in this paper to broad recommendations on HRV, where possible we will specify when our recommendations apply to vagal tone, given its relevance for psychophysiology

Objectives

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Conclusion