Cognitive Science & Psychology Division, ULAB

The physiological response to stress and an individual’s subjective perception of stress are two systems vital to enabling adaptive responses to dangerous stimuli and maintaining individual well-being. When the body’s biological stress response and psychological interpretations of stress become misaligned, referred to as a low stress-heart rate coherence, detriments to health can occur (Sommerfeldt et al., 2019). Objective measures of physical stress, such as interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, pro-inflammatory biomarkers of stress, and heart rate were analyzed in association with self-reported stress, measures of well-being, anxiety, and depression in a pool of Midlife participants from the United States. The present study utilized this data to replicate analyses performed by the original paper, “Individual Differences in the Association Between Subjective Stress and Heart Rate Are Related to Psychological and Physical Well-Being”. Preliminary findings from this effort indicate inconsistencies between standard statistical values due to missing data, however still illustrate a significant association between stress-heart rate coherence and wellbeing. We additionally attempted to explore the data further by running all statistical analyses for just white participants, hypothesizing that greater stress-heart rate coherence might be limited to this overrepresented demographic. We could not confirm nor deny the prediction, as we did not have access to full data to run analyses with minority data. In any case, all analyses yielded positive associations between individual well-being and stress heart-rate coherence, although further studies with more representative samples are imperative in understanding the generalizability and mechanisms for coherence.