Abstract
Facing a stressor involves a cardiac vagal tone response and a feedback effect produced by social interaction in visceral regulation. This study evaluated the contribution of baseline vagal tone and of social engagement system (SES) functioning on the ability to deal with a stressor. Participants (n = 70) were grouped into a minimized social interaction condition (procedure administered through a PC) and a social interaction condition (procedure administered by an experimenter). The State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and a debriefing questionnaire were completed by the subjects. The baseline vagal tone was registered during the baseline, stressor and recovery phases. The collected results highlighted a significant effect of the baseline vagal tone on vagal suppression. No effect of minimized vs. social interaction conditions on cardiac vagal tone during stressor and recovery phases was detected. Cardiac vagal tone and the results of the questionnaires appear to be not correlated. The study highlighted the main role of baseline vagal tone on visceral regulation. Some remarks on SES to be deepen in further research were raised.
Highlights
Cardiac vagal tone is the output of the central autonomic network and, according to the neurovisceral integration model (Thayer et al, 2009), it may be considered a marker of the ability to face stress
First of all it is necessary to focus on the complexity of the concept of “social interaction” that we tried to assess in this study
Given this premise, based on the theoretical point of view proposed by polyvagal theory (Porges, 2007) we considered the “social interaction” factor by distinguishing two different elements that can characterize it: (a) the feedback effect that a human social interaction between the experimenter and participants can determine on the visceral states and autonomic regulation of participants through social engagement system (SES) and (b) the possible effect on autonomic regulation linked to the innate tendency to co-regulate with others as outlined by an extensive literature on intersubjectivity (Morganti et al, 2008)
Summary
Cardiac vagal tone is the output of the central autonomic network and, according to the neurovisceral integration model (Thayer et al, 2009), it may be considered a marker of the ability to face stress. Research on stress conducted on new-borns and infants constituted some of the first studies in the field of cardiac vagal tone during the 1970 and 1980s (Porges, 2007). In line with this tradition of research, Polyvagal theory proposes a new conceptualization of stress and considers cardiac vagal tone as an effective index of stress and stress vulnerability (Porges, 1995).
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