Respiratory sinus arrhythmia

Maternal substance use may interfere with optimal parenting, lowering maternal responsiveness during interactions with their children. Previous work has identified maternal autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to parenting-relevant stressors as a promising indicator of real-world parenting behaviors. However, less is known about the extent to which individual differences in emotion dysregulation and reward processing, two mechanisms of substance use, relate to maternal ANS reactivity in substance-using populations...

Research on respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or high-frequency heart rate variability (its frequency-domain equivalent), has been popular in psychology and the behavioral sciences for some time. It is typically interpreted as an indicator of cardiac vagal activity. However, as research has shown for decades, the respiratory pattern can influence the amplitude of these noninvasive measures substantially, without necessarily reflecting changes in tonic cardiac vagal activity. Although changes in respiration are systematically associated with experiential and behavioral states, this potential confounder in the interpretation of RSA, or HF-HRV, is rarely considered...

Background: People with substance use disorders (SUDs) who have experienced serious childhood trauma may have executive function impairments contributing to relapse. Baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reflects physiological regulation capacity, which has been found to buffer the negative effects of childhood trauma. Baseline RSA has also been found to be related to intraindividual reaction time variability (IIRTV), which is an index of executive function. Objectives: The present study examined the relationship between childhood trauma and perceived relapse tendency, the mediation role of IIRTV, and the moderation role of baseline RSA...

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the association between youth post-disaster stress responses and co-rumination in conversations with a parent several years after a devastating tornado. METHOD: Adolescents ( N  = 200) drawn from an ongoing study for aggressive youth (ages 13 to 17; 80% African American) and their parents experienced an EF-4 tornado in 2011 and then provided joint recollections about their tornado experiences approximately 5 years later...

In children and adults, individual differences in patterns of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; i.e., interactions between resting RSA and RSA reactivity to stress) have emerged as a central predictor of internalizing symptoms. However, it is unclear whether individual differences in patterns of RSA also contribute to internalizing symptoms during the key developmental period of early adolescence, when rates of internalizing symptoms sharply increase. In the present multi-wave longitudinal study, we assessed whether patterns of RSA predicted trajectories of the two most common types of internalizing symptoms among adolescents: anxiety and depression...

BACKGROUND: The Toronto Adolescent and Youth (TAY) Cohort study will characterize the neurobiological trajectories of psychosis spectrum symptoms (PSS), functioning, and suicidality (i.e., suicidal thoughts and behaviors) in youth seeking mental health care. Here, we present the neuroimaging and biosamples component of the protocol. We also present feasibility and quality control (QC) metrics for the baseline sample collected thus far. METHODS: The present study includes youth (aged 11-24 years) referred to child and youth mental health services within a large, tertiary care centre in Toronto, Canada, with target recruitment of 1500 participants...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is a rare immune-mediated demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). There is a lack of reports of sick sinus syndrome (SSS) associated with NMOSD; thus, we hereby report two cases of patients with NMOSD who developed SSS. CASES PRESENTATION: The patients were both male and presented with area postrema syndrome. Brain MRI showed lesions in the dorsal part of their medulla oblongata...

Prenatal opioid exposure has been associated with developmental problems, including autonomic nervous system dysregulation. However, little is known about the effects of prenatal opioid exposure on the autonomic nervous system beyond the first days of life, particularly across both the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches, and when accounting for exposure to other substances. The present study examined the effects of prenatal exposure to opioid agonist therapy (OAT, e.g., methadone) and other opioids on infant autonomic nervous system activity at rest and in response to a social stressor (the Still-Face Paradigm) at six months among 86 infants varying in prenatal opioid and other substance exposure...

Porges' polyvagal theory (1991) proposes that the activity of the vagal nerve modulates moment-by-moment changes in adaptive behavior during stress. However, most work, including research with infants, has only examined vagal changes at low temporal resolutions, averaging 30+ s across phases of structured stressor paradigms. Thus, the true timescale of vagal regulation-and the extent to which it can be observed during unprompted crying-is unknown. The current study utilized a recently validated method to calculate respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) dynamically at a high resolution of 5 Hz (updated every 200 ms) in a home-based infant study...

Mother-child interaction has been characterized by a fine-tuning of behavior and physiological activity. Yet, little is known about the dynamics of mother-child physiological synchrony during early school age and their associations to positive affect. To investigate these processes, 42 mother-child dyads, with children aged 8 to 10 years, played an interactive game while their interbeat intervals (IBI) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were measured simultaneously. IBI/RSA synchrony was calculated using cross-correlations of the IBI/RSA second-by-second time series for lags - 3 to + 3 seconds...

Aging ushers in numerous disruptions to autonomic nervous system (ANS) function. Although the effects of aging on ANS function at rest are well characterized, there is surprising variation in reports of age-related differences in ANS reactivity to psychosocial stressors, with some reports of decreases and other reports of increases in reactivity with age. The sources of variation in age-related differences are largely unknown. Nonhuman primate models of socioaffective aging may help to uncover sources of this variation as nonhuman primates share key features of human ANS structure and function and researchers have precise control over the environments in which they age...

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), the natural variation in heart rate synchronized with respiration, has been extensively studied in emotional and cognitive contexts. Various time or frequency-based methods using the cardiac signal have been proposed to analyze RSA. In this study, we present a novel approach that combines respiratory phase and heart rate to enable a more detailed analysis of RSA and its dynamics throughout the respiratory cycle. To facilitate the application of this method, we have implemented it in an open-source Python toolbox called physio This toolbox includes essential functionalities for processing ECG and respiratory signals, while also introducing this new approach for RSA analysis...

Introduction: A high prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) among Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) patients has been observed in both community and clinical populations. Due to the overlapping symptoms between both disorders, depression is usually misdiagnosed when correlated with OSA. Phase coherence between respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and respiration (λ RSA-RESP ) has been proposed as an alternative measure for assessing vagal activity. Therefore, this study aims to investigate if there is any difference in λ RSA-RESP in OSA patients with and without MDD...

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been used to measure autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity noninvasively. The purpose of this study was to identify the most suitable HRV parameters for ANS activity in response to brief rectal distension (RD) in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). IBS patients participated in a five-session study. During each visit, an ECG was recorded for 15 min for baseline values and during rectal distension. For rectal distension, a balloon was inflated in the rectum and the pressure was increased in steps of 5 mmHg for 30 s; each distension was followed by a 30 s rest period when the balloon was fully deflated (0 mmHg) until either the maximum tolerance of each patient was reached or up to 60 mmHg...

Shyness is a temperamental trait that refers to fear and wariness in the face of social novelty and is known to have a biological basis. One proposed physiological correlate of shyness has been the change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) from baseline to a stressor. However, past research linking shyness and RSA change has been mixed, which may be, in part, due to a failure to carefully consider the context under which RSA change is measured and the directionality of relations. Using a longitudinal design and cross-lagged analysis ( N = 103, 52 girls), we examined parent-reported shyness and RSA change during a stranger approach task (social stressor) and a locked box task (nonsocial stressor) at ages 3 ( M age at Time 1 = 3...

In semantic dementia (SD), asymmetric degeneration of the anterior temporal lobes is associated with loss of semantic knowledge and alterations in socioemotional behavior. There are two clinical variants of SD: semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), which is characterized by predominant atrophy in the anterior temporal lobe and insula in the left hemisphere, and semantic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD), which is characterized by predominant atrophy in those structures in the right hemisphere...

BACKGROUND: Although it is known that sound exposure evokes changes in autonomic activity, the effects of noise and music on the nonlinear behavior of heart rate fluctuations remain poorly understood and controversial. This study aims to assess the influence of sound subjective emotional valence and arousal on the nonlinear characteristics of the autonomic nervous system during passive listening. METHODS: In this study, 42 subjects listened to four sounds: (1) white noise, (2) road traffic noise, (3) excitatory music, and (4) a lullaby...

BACKGROUND: Drugs used for sedation/analgesia may affect the basic cardiac electrophysiologic properties or even supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) inducibility. Dexmedetomidine (DEX) is a selective alpha-2 adrenergic agonist with sedative and analgesic properties. A comprehensive evaluation on use of DEX for reentrant SVT ablation in adults is lacking. The present study aims to systematically assess the impact of DEX on cardiac electrophysiology and SVT inducibility. METHODS: Hemodynamic, electrocardiographic, and electrophysiological parameters and SVT inducibility were assessed before and after DEX infusion in patients scheduled for ablation of reentrant SVT...

Research suggests that women's autonomic nervous system responses to infant cries capture processes that affect their parenting behaviors. The aim of this study was to build on prior work by testing whether pregnant women's autonomic responses to an unfamiliar infant crying also predict their infants' emerging regulation abilities. Participants included 97 women in their third trimester of pregnancy, located in the United States. Most participants identified as White/non-Hispanic (48%) or Hispanic (30%), their mean age was approximately 30 years, and the modal family income was $40,000-$79,999...

Chronic heavy alcohol use profoundly affects the cardiovascular system, contributing to several life-threatening cardiovascular diseases. Heart rate variability (HRV), or the fluctuations in heart rate, reflects dynamic autonomic nervous system processes that change to meet biological demands and environmental challenges. In the current study, we examined whether HRV metrics are altered in alcohol use disorder (AUD) during waking and sleeping with passive biomonitoring as participants went about their daily lives...