About me
Embrace the Beat: Empathy and Heart Rate Flexibility
Location: 63
Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Britton
Empathy is important for understanding others and maintaining social relations. Expressing empathy may be influenced by the ability to be flexible with thoughts and feelings. Physiological flexibility is often measured using heart rate variability (HRV) at resting baseline. Previous research found a negative relationship between self-reported empathy and task-induced HRV (Cho, et al., 2023), but none have looked at resting HRV. In this study, 61 University of Miami undergraduate students (M = 18.97, SD = ± 1.06, ranging from 17-22 years old, 52.4% female, 23.0% minority, 23% Hispanic) completed the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) and perseverative thinking questionnaire (PTQ). Additionally, heart rate and respiration were recorded during a 5-minute rest period to obtain resting HRV measures, Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) and Root Mean Square of Successive Differences (RMSSD). Results showed a significant negative correlation between PTQ and HRV (RSA: r(59) = -.328, p = .011, RMSSD: r(59) = -.276, p = .034). Although a positive correlation between IRI and PTQ emerged (r(61)=.303, p =.018), no correlation was observed between IRI and HRV (RSA: r(58) = -.100, p = .450, RMSSD: r(59) = .007, p= .956). The IRI distress subscale, however, was significantly correlated with RSA (RSA: r(59) = -.319, p = .014) suggesting emotion may be an important aspect to consider. Given these outcomes, future studies should investigate other domains of empathy (e.g emotional) in addition to cognitive ones (e.g IRI).
