Does rejecting negative emotions impact your heart rate?
People who struggle to accept negative emotions tend to have lower heart rate variability, which indicates a less flexible physiological response to stress.
Source
The Association between Self-Reported Difficulties in Emotion Regulation and Heart Rate Variability: The Salient Role of Not Accepting Negative Emotions
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — DERS plus resting ECG-derived HRV in a student sample
- N
- N=60 · 62 enrolled; 2 removed for poor ECG quality; 70% female, ages 19–31, mean 23
- Population
- University of Bergen students
- Outcome
- Resting heart-rate variability associated with self-reported emotion-regulation difficulties, especially non-acceptance of negative emotion
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Does rejecting negative emotions impact your heart rate?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
60 participants
In sum, data from 60 participants were analyzed (70% female, age range 19 – 31, mean age 23.5, SD = 2.6).
36 item
DERS is a 36 item questionnaire designed for measuring six facets of difficulties in emotion regulation.
What they did
The researchers recruited 60 university students in Norway to complete a 36-item questionnaire designed to measure six different aspects of emotional processing. They recorded the participants' resting heart rate variability during a 15-minute laboratory session using an electrocardiogram. Additionally, a smaller subsample of 28 participants wore portable heart monitors to track their cardiac activity over a 24-hour period in their normal daily environments.
What they found
Having greater difficulties with emotion regulation, particularly a tendency to reject negative feelings, was linked to lower resting heart rate variability. This negative association between lack of emotional acceptance and heart rate variability was also found during normal daytime hours in the 24-hour ambulatory monitoring. Other facets of emotional difficulties, such as lack of emotional awareness or clarity, did not show a strong or consistent relationship with heart rate variability.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the study design was correlational, it cannot prove that failing to accept emotions directly causes physiological stress or lower heart rate variability. The participants were mostly young, female, and healthy university students, meaning these patterns might not apply to clinical groups, older adults, or different demographics. The research relied on self-report surveys to assess emotional difficulties, which can be vulnerable to subjective biases like social desirability or poor self-awareness.
Key terms
- Heart rate variability
- The variation in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, which serves as an index of autonomic nervous system flexibility.
- Parasympathetic nervous system
- The branch of the autonomic nervous system responsible for calming the body and slowing down the heart rate.
- Vagus nerve
- A major nerve that connects the brain to the heart and other organs, playing a key role in slowing heart rate and managing stress responses.
- Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale
- A 36-item self-report questionnaire used to assess various challenges in managing and understanding emotions.
- Ecological validity
- The degree to which research findings can be generalized to real-world, natural settings outside of a controlled laboratory environment.
- Neurovisceral integration
- A theoretical model proposing that brain networks involved in emotion regulation are also directly linked to autonomic control of the heart.
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Quiz yourself
What does a high resting heart rate variability (HRV) typically indicate about the autonomic nervous system?
Common questions
Why is high heart rate variability considered a good thing?
High heart rate variability indicates that the parasympathetic nervous system is active and flexible, allowing the body to easily adapt to changing environmental demands and recover from stress.
What is the difference between resting HRV and 24-hour HRV?
Resting HRV is measured during a brief, quiet period in a laboratory, whereas 24-hour HRV captures autonomic activity during real-world daily activities and sleep.
Why did the researchers look specifically at non-acceptance of emotions?
Resisting or suppressing negative emotions requires significant mental and physiological effort, which can keep the body in a heightened state of stress and lower heart rate variability.
Did the study find any differences during nighttime sleep?
No, the connection between emotion regulation difficulties and heart rate variability was present during the day but disappeared during nighttime sleep.
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