Dynamic autonomic nervous system patterns differentiate human emotions and manifest in resting physiology

Abstract

Whether activity in the autonomic nervous system differs during distinct emotions remains controversial. We obtained continuous multichannel recordings of autonomic nervous system activity in healthy adults during a video-based emotional reactivity task. Dimensionality reduction revealed five principal components in the autonomic time series data, and these modes of covariation differentiated periods of baseline from those of video-viewing. Unsupervised clustering of the principal component time series data uncovered separable autonomic states that distinguished among the five emotion-inducing trials. These autonomic states were also detected in baseline physiology but were intermittent and of smaller magnitude. Our results suggest the autonomic nervous system assembles dynamic activity patterns during emotions that are similar across people and are present even during undirected moments of rest.

An investigation of cardiac vagal tone over time and its relation to vigilance performance: a growth curve modeling approach

“…This further supports the notion that psychophysiological measures need to be modeled over time given they are process-based measures. Future research should explore if more granular analyses are warranted to understand if vagal tone changes occur more frequently than every 5 min in line with research finding changes in other measures of autonomic functioning at smaller time scales (e.g., Golland et al, 2014;Pasquini et al, 2022). Even though 5 min is thought to be the minimum amount of time necessary for an accurate HRV measure, other work finds reliable estimates for shorter time periods (Laborde et al, 2017;Tung et al, 2021).…”

“…Previous research found individual differences in HRV measures over time were due to external task demands and features (Smolders et al, 2012;Obradović and Finch, 2017;Blanck et al, 2019;Smith et al, 2019;Schwarck et al, 2021;Spangler et al, 2021;Tung et al, 2021;Benz et al, 2022), even with very low birth weight neonates (Padhye et al, 2009). Similarly, prior research has shown differences in autonomic activity in response to emotional stimuli when investigated as longitudinal trajectoriesa feature not previously found when the autonomic activity was averaged across trials (e.g., Golland et al, 2014;Pasquini et al, 2022). Thus, autonomic functions including cardiac vagal tone are not likely to remain stable over long periods of time and have been used to measure individual differences in cognitive and emotional regulation.…”