The Current and Future Role of Heart Rate Variability for Assessing and Training Compassion

Abstract

The evolution of mammalian caregiving involving hormones, such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and the myelinated vagal nerve as part of the ventral parasympathetic system, enables humans to connect, co-regulate each other’s emotions and create prosociality. Compassion-based interventions draw upon a number of specific exercises and strategies to stimulate these physiological processes and create conditions of “interpersonal safeness,” thereby helping people engage with, alleviate, and prevent suffering. Hence, compassion-based approaches are connected with our evolved caring motivation and attachment and our general affiliative systems that help regulate distress. Physiologically, they are connected to activity of the vagus nerve and corresponding adaptive heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is an important physiological marker for overall health, and the body–mind connection. Therefore, there is significant value of training compassion to increase HRV and training HRV to facilitate compassion. Despite the significance of compassion in alleviating and preventing suffering, there remain difficulties in its precise assessment. HRV offers a useful form of measurement to assess and train compassion. Specific examples of what exercises can facilitate HRV and how to measure HRV will be described. This paper argues that the field of compassion science needs to move toward including HRV as a primary outcome measure in its future assessment and training, due to its connection to vagal regulatory activity, and its link to overall health and well-being.

The development of compassionate engagement and action scales for self and others

“…Indeed, rather than (only) working directly with shame or self-criticism to try to undermine it, CFT focuses on building compassion motivation, a compassionate sense of self and skills, which then impact on physiological systems (such as parasympathetic tone) that promote well-being and thus reduce both self-criticism and depression [40,43,68]. Indeed, there is good evidence that compassion training changes a range of physiological systems [68] including the immune and cardiovascular system, and areas in the frontal cortex due to neuroplasticity (see [108] for reviews).…”

“…Our approach is based on a standard definition of compassion as a 'sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it' [21,46,64,104]. The impetus for this research was inspired by a wealth of research showing e that developing caring and compassion-focused motives for self and others has a range of benefits: on genetic expression [14,31,109], physiological processes [9,68,71,73,107,108], psychological processes [63,64,66,108], and social relationships [16,18,100]. Cultivating compassion for self and others has also become a central focus for the development of psychotherapies [35,37,40,61,67,69,77,96].…”

Shame and the vulnerable self in medical contexts: the compassionate solution

“…Such training would involve the usual attending, listening and communication skills, but also those aimed at recognising and responding to emotions compassionately, empathically and through reflective perspective taking, developing self-insight and compassion for oneself. Compassionate mind training could therefore be a way clinicians could learn to look after themselves and practise holding their compassionate states for self-support and grounding,33 57 improving parasympathetic tone and autonomic balance 58. Training in using body postures, voice tones and pacing can also advance compassionate consultations 33.…”

Treating hoarding disorder with compassion‐focused therapy: A pilot study examining treatment feasibility, acceptability, and exploring treatment effects

“…Hence, although the content of the coping thought may be helpful, the emotional texture may be a contributor to more psychological distress (Gilbert, ). CFT emphasizes evolutionary psychology theories, in particular, that humans, like most mammals, evolved to be regulated through caring connections and to have neurophysiological and physiological systems that are very responsive to caring stimuli (Kirby, Doty, Petrocchi, & Gilbert, ; Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, ). One of the core themes of CFT is that if people are unable to access these basic physiological systems that evolved to help regulate threat‐based processing, they may struggle with purely behavioural or cognitive interventions.…”