ArticlePsychophysiology2017
Resting sympathetic arousal moderates the association between parasympathetic reactivity and working memory performance in adults reporting high levels of life stress.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Monitoring stress and allostatic load in first responders and tactical operators using heart rate variability: a systematic review.BMC public health · 2021Pooled it
- Respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity across empirically based structural dimensions of psychopathology: A meta-analysis.Psychophysiology · 2019Pooled it
- Autonomic nervous system reactivity to alcohol-related cues in cocaine use disorder: vagal-sympathetic balance and clinical implications.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- The effect of acute stress on executive function in children: Moderation by parasympathetic nervous system activity.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Review
- Heart-focused breathing technique and attitude breathing technique effects on heart rate variability in young healthy subjects.Physiological reports · 2025Article
- Investigating autonomic biomarkers of sensory processing patterns in young adults.The British journal of occupational therapy · 2022Article
- Continuous Neurophysiologic Data Accurately Predict Mood and Energy in the Elderly.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Pre-pandemic autonomic nervous system activity predicts mood regulation expectancies during COVID-19 in Israel.Psychophysiology · 2021Article
- Paradoxical effect of cumulative stress exposure on information processing speed in Hispanics/Latinos with elevated heart rate variability.International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology · 2021Article
- Stress system reactivity moderates the association between cumulative risk and children's externalizing symptoms.International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- Parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems interactively predict change in cognitive functioning in midlife adults.Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- Cortical and affective regulation of autonomic coordination.Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- Entropy in Heart Rate Dynamics Reflects How HRV-Biofeedback Training Improves Neurovisceral Complexity during Stress-Cognition Interactions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Alterations in heart-brain interactions under mild stress during a cognitive task are reflected in entropy of heart rate dynamics.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Ability-Based Emotional Intelligence Is Associated With Greater Cardiac Vagal Control and Reactivity.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
- Parasympathetic and sympathetic activity are associated with individual differences in neural indices of selective attention in adults.Psychophysiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The neurovisceral integration model stipulates that autonomic function plays a critical role in the regulation of higher-order cognitive processes, yet most work to date has examined parasympathetic function in isolation from sympathetic function. Furthermore, the majority of work has been conducted on normative samples, which typically demonstrate parasympathetic withdrawal to increase arousal needed to complete cognitive tasks. Little is known about how autonomic regulation supports cognitive function in populations exposed to high levels of stress, which is critical given that chronic stress exposure alters autonomic function. To address this, we sought to characterize how parasympathetic (high-frequency heart rate variability, HF-HRV) and sympathetic (preejection period, PEP) measures of cardiac function contribute to individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity in a sample of high-risk women. HF-HRV and PEP were measured at rest and during a visual change detection measure of WM. Multilevel modeling was used to examine within-person fluctuations in WM performance throughout the task concurrently with HF-HRV and PEP, as well as between-person differences as a function of resting HF-HRV and PEP levels. Results indicate that resting PEP moderated the association between HF-HRV reactivity and WM capacity. Increases in WM capacity across the task were associated with increases in parasympathetic activity, but only among individuals with longer resting PEP (lower sympathetic arousal). Follow-up analyses showed that shorter resting PEP was associated with greater cumulative risk exposure. These results support the autonomic space framework, in that the relationship between behavior and parasympathetic function appears dependent on resting sympathetic activation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.