TY - JOUR

T1 - Helping from the heart

T2 - Voluntary upregulation of heart rate variability predicts altruistic behavior

AU - Bornemann, Boris

AU - Kok, Bethany E.

AU - Böckler, Anne

AU - Singer, Tania

N1 - Funding Information: The ReSource Project in which this study was conducted is a collaborative effort by the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Science. We are thankful to all members of the department as well as countless outside collaborators who have supported us. We are particularly thankful to Astrid Ackermann, Christina Bochow, Matthias Bolz, and Sandra Zurborg for managing the study, to Hannes Niederhausen, Henrik Grunert, and Thorsten Kästner for their technical support, and to Sylvia Tydecks, Elisabeth Murzik, and Kerstin Träger for their help with recruitment and data collection. Tania Singer, as principal investigator, received funding for the ReSource Project from a) the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement Number 205557 ), and b) from the Max Planck Society .

PY - 2016/9

Y1 - 2016/9

N2 - Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically, incidental increases in HF-HRV accompany positive social engagement behavior and prosocial action. Little is known about deliberate regulation of HF-HRV and the role of voluntary parasympathetic regulation in prosocial behavior. Here, we present a novel biofeedback task that measures the ability to deliberately increase HF-HRV. In two large samples, we find that a) participants are able to voluntarily upregulate HF-HRV, and b) variation in this ability predicts individual differences in altruistic prosocial behavior, but not non-altruistic forms of prosociality, assessed through 14 different measures. Our findings suggest that self-induction of parasympathetic states is involved in altruistic action. The biofeedback task may provide a measure of deliberate parasympathetic regulation, with implications for the study of attention, emotion, and social behavior.

AB - Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically, incidental increases in HF-HRV accompany positive social engagement behavior and prosocial action. Little is known about deliberate regulation of HF-HRV and the role of voluntary parasympathetic regulation in prosocial behavior. Here, we present a novel biofeedback task that measures the ability to deliberately increase HF-HRV. In two large samples, we find that a) participants are able to voluntarily upregulate HF-HRV, and b) variation in this ability predicts individual differences in altruistic prosocial behavior, but not non-altruistic forms of prosociality, assessed through 14 different measures. Our findings suggest that self-induction of parasympathetic states is involved in altruistic action. The biofeedback task may provide a measure of deliberate parasympathetic regulation, with implications for the study of attention, emotion, and social behavior.

KW - Altruism

KW - Biofeedback

KW - Heart rate variability

KW - Parasympathetic nervous system

KW - Prosocial behavior

KW - Regulation

KW - Vagal flexibility

KW - Vagus

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84978805748&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.07.004

DO - 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.07.004

M3 - Article

C2 - 27381930

AN - SCOPUS:84978805748

VL - 119

SP - 54

EP - 63

JO - Biological psychology

JF - Biological psychology

SN - 0301-0511

ER -