(PS11-100) Worry, Rumination, and Heart Rate Variability in Laboratory Studies Among Healthy Subjects: A Meta-analysis

Worry and rumination are common forms of perseverative cognition (PC) and repetitive negative thinking towards stressors. PC can generate psychophysiological stress before or after exposure to stressors and is linked to chronic stress, diseases, and adverse health outcomes. PC is correlated with vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV), a noninvasive stress biomarker closely associated with cardiovascular diseases and mortality. A previous meta-analysis synthesized laboratory studies examining the effect of PC on vmHRV and found a small effect size (g = 0.15) for 18 PC experimental studies. However, the authors did not distinguish between baseline, reactivity, and recovery vmHRV as well as between-subject and within-subject effect sizes. Baseline, reactivity, and recovery vmHRV are shown by previous research to be different psychophysiological processes with different health implications. Therefore, the specific goals of the present meta-analysis in addition to providing an updated meta-analytic review are to compute effect sizes separately for (a) baseline, reactivity, and recovery vmHRV studies (b) within-subject and between-subject design studies and (c) conduct moderator analyses.  55 effect sizes were extracted from 29 eligible studies (17 for baseline, 15 for reactivity, 8 for recovery). Fourteen meta-analyses were conducted for between-subject and within-subject design studies on baseline, reactivity, and recovery vmHRV. We found small to medium effect sizes for the correlation between PC and lower baseline resting vmHRV (g = .40, SE = .10), within-subject reactivity vmHRV (g = .27, SE = .07), and between-subject (High trait PC vs Low trait PC) recovery vmHRV (g = .44, SE = .18). The other meta-analyses did not yield statistically significant effect sizes. High heterogeneity was detected across the meta-analyses and statistical tests suggested the absence of publication biases. Moderator analyses were conducted and discussed. Overall, PC in laboratory studies was observed to be associated with lower baseline, reactivity, and recovery vmHRV among healthy subjects.