Opinion: “Heart Rate Variability, Health and Well-Being: A Systems Perspective” Research Topic

The promotion of health and well-being is a long-standing goal of scientific inquiries.The World Health Organization mission incorporates not only the absence of disease but also an integrative perspective on social, physical, and mental well-being (1).The National Institutes of Health goals are intimately focused on protecting and improving health through funding research and facilitating programs that promote public health (2).Healthy People is an example of a broadly focused, long-range strategic initiative that incorporates results from scientific inquiry into health promotion recommendations (3).Therefore, scientific strategies to understand, describe, and predict health-related issues are important steps in the process of promoting health and welfare.The Frontiers research topic titled "Heart Rate Variability, Health, and Well-being: A Systems Perspective" is focused on the construct of heart rate variability (HRV) in the context of health and well-being.Autonomic control of peripheral functions involves a complex series of interactions, including the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems as well as central processes, neuroendocrine functions, and reflex arcs.Therefore, studies involving HRV have the potential to provide insight into a wide variety of psychological and physiological processes.Altered HRV, and its value for predicting dysfunction (or lack thereof), has contributed significantly to our understanding of several conditions [for reviews, see Ref. (4, 5)] such as stress reactivity and resilience (6, 7); emotional reactivity and personality factors (e.g., responses to stress, perception of stress, emotional memory, attention and related cognitive functions, and self-regulation processes) (8-12); emotion-related disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders) (13, 14); social behaviors (e.g., social engagement and social-emotional processes) (15-17); cardiovascular functions and risk factors (e.g., hypertension, myocardial infarction, sudden cardiac death, renal dysfunction, and diabetes) (4); and cancer (18).The study of HRV also has provided insight into the interactions of psychological and physiological processes [for review, see Ref. (15)], including stress reactivity following cardiac transplants (8); effects of antidepressants on autonomic function in panic disorder (19); association of depression and cardiovascular disease (13, 20-25); interactions of social factors and cardiovascular function (26)(27)(28); treatments for comorbid psychological and physiological conditions (29-32); and novel non-pharmacological treatment strategies for psychological and physiological disorders, such as deep brain stimulation, vagal nerve stimulation, exercise, or yoga (31,(33)(34)(35).These brief examples highlight the value of HRV research for describing and predicting several conditions that influence public health.This integrative research topic on HRV which spans two Frontiers journals (Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Public Health), contributes novel perspectives on the scientific and practical value of HRV research.For example, Kirby and colleagues (12) address the utility of HRV in training exercises to facilitate compassion, highlighting the importance of considering physiological processes in the context of psychological interventions.As discussed, a better understanding of behavioral, social, and emotional factors that contribute to HRV will provide evidence for its utility as an outcome measure, a potential method for manipulating behavioral and emotional states, and an index for understanding the integration of autonomic regulation and emotional reactivity (12).Similarly, Lamb et al. (35) and Steffen et al. (36) present novel findings from techniques that capitalize on altering