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Higher heart-rate variability is associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity and increased resistance to temptation in dietary self-control challenges
Maier and Hare (2017) tested the hypothesis that greater heart-rate variability (HRV), which is a marker of physiological flexibility, would be associated with better dietary self-control in humans, since reports have suggested a positive association between self-control with physical health (and psychosocial). The study hoped to find out whether total HRV at sedentary rest (calculated as the standard deviation of normal-to-normal intervals) can act as a biomarker for neurophysiological adaptability, which is generally considered to underlie self-controlled behavior. The authors found that HRV explained a significant portion of the individual variability in dietary self-control, with individuals having higher HRV being better able to downregulate their cravings in the face of taste temptations. Moreover, HRV was associated with activity patterns in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a key node in the brain’s valuation and decision circuitry. This meant higher HRV scores correlated to greater overall vmPFC blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity and attenuated taste representations when presented with a dietary self-control challenge. Maier and Hare (2017) also revealed consistent behavioral and neural associations with HRV across both the stress induction and control experimental conditions, suggesting HRV may serve as a robust and available biomarker for self-control ability across environmental contexts. [NPID: cognition, heart-rate variability, HRV, self-control, prefrontal cortex, stress]
Year: 2017
