Anxiety and Attentional Processes: The Role of Resting Heart Rate Variability

Abstract

Individuals with high anxiety preferentially focus attention on emotional information. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays an important role in modulating both anxiety and attentional processes. Despite many studies having evaluated attentional bias in anxious people, few of them have investigated the change blindness phenomenon associated with the attentional response toward salient stimuli, considering the role of the ANS. This study aimed to examine the role of heart rate variability (HRV) in trait anxiety and top-down and bottom-up attentional processes toward emotional stimuli. Seventy-five healthy university students were divided into high (N = 39) and low (N = 36) trait anxiety groups and completed a change detection flicker task with neutral, positive, and negative stimuli. The results evidenced a different attentional pattern between people with high and low anxiety considering both the two attentional processes and the valence of the stimuli. Specifically, individuals with high anxiety showed a bias in elaborating emotional stimuli related to their salience (i.e., negative stimuli were faster elaborated than neutral and positive stimuli when top-down attentional mechanisms were involved, while slower performances were highlighted considering bottom-up attentional mechanisms in response to emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli). Moreover, an association between HRV, trait anxiety levels, and change blindness phenomenon was confirmed. These results underline the role of HRV as a possible predictor of the alteration of attentional mechanism in anxiety.

Decision making and heart rate variability: A systematic review

“…The 15 studies selected were conducted from 2010 (Brunborg et al, 2010) to 2021 (Forte, Favieri, et al, Sütterlin et al, 2011a;Sütterlin et al, 2011b;Dunn et al, 2012;Ramírez et al, 2015;Steenbergen et al, 2020;Forte, Favieri, et al, 2021; and 65 years (Dunn et al, 2012), and with a percentage of men in the studies varying between 29% (Dunn et al, 2012) and 100% (Laborde & Raab, 2013).…”

“…Recent reviews showed that HRV and cognitive performance are positively related (Forte et al, 2019; Grässler et al, 2020). Higher resting HRV is associated with better cognitive performance and a broader self‐control ability (Forte, Favieri, et al, 2021; Forte, Morelli, & Casagrande, 2021; Maier & Hare, 2017). The centrality of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in decision‐making and its control over cardiac activity suggests that HRV could be a marker of individuals' ability to make decisions, especially under risk and under conditions of uncertainty.…”

“…Drucaroff et al, 2011) controlled confounding variables (age, gender, years of education, neurological, psychiatric and cardiovascular diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, pregnancy, IQ, global cognitive functioning, drug and alcohol use, gambling disorder, medication affecting the central nervous or cardiovascular system, hours of physical exercise per week, smoking, caffeine, social desirability, blood pressure, and body mass index).4.2 | HRV measurementAll studies performed HRV measurement by continuous ECG recording of a minimum of 5 min, according to the European and North American cardiology societies(Malik, 1996), except for Laborde and Raab's study (2013) that reported 3-min recordings. Seven studies(Drucaroff et al, 2011;Sütterlin et al, 2011aSütterlin et al, , 2011bDunn et al, 2012;Ramírez et al, 2015;Park et al, 2016;Steenbergen et al, 2020) evaluated resting HRV, four studies(Dulleck et al, 2011;Fooken & Schaffner, 2016;Fung et al, 2017;Serra et al, 2019) evaluated only reactivity HRV (i.e., during the task), three studies(Alacreu-Crespo et al, 2018;Brunborg et al, 2010;Forte, Favieri, et al, 2021;) evaluated resting, reactivity and recovery HRV. Finally, the study ofLaborde and Raab (2013) evaluated resting and reactivity HRV recordings.…”

Heart Rate Variability and Pain: A Systematic Review

“…The authors of the NVIM proposed a core set of neural structures, referred to as the Central Autonomic Network (CAN), which provides the ability to continuously assess and prepare the organism for an appropriate response [ 18 ]. In the NVIM, heart rate variability (HRV) has been proposed as an index of flexible and adaptive regulation of the nervous system to organize a homeostatic response to environmental requests and which is related to cognitive functions [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. HRV represents the change in the time interval between successive heartbeats.…”

Modeling Skin Conductance Response Time Series during Consecutive Rapid Decision-Making under Concurrent Temporal Pressure and Information Ambiguity

“…State anxiety is associated with increased local functional connections within the posterior regions of the DMN, such as the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. A recent physiological study has provided additional evidence that, as the power of high-frequency HRV for prefrontal inhibition increases, cognitive/motor performance is improved in people with higher trait anxiety [ 81 ]. To summarize these findings, on the one hand, participants reporting higher trait anxiety may activate a prefrontal inhibition system to suppress automatic emotional reactivity during the IGT and produce a more negative association between model fitting coefficients and trait anxiety scores.…”