title: Helping from the heart: Voluntary upregulation of heart rate variability predicts altruistic behavior.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany. Electronic address: bornemann@cbs.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Boris
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bornemann
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany.
authors.forename: Bethany E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Kok
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany; Department of Psychology, Würzburg University, Germany.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Böckler
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany.
authors.forename: Tania
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Singer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000533:Altruism; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001676:Biofeedback, Psychology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Altruism; Biofeedback; Heart rate variability; Parasympathetic nervous system; Prosocial behavior; Regulation; Vagal flexibility; Vagus