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Background: Prolonged cardiac activity that exceeds metabolic needs can be detrimental for somatic health. Psychological stress could result in such "additional cardiac activity."Purpose: In this study, we examined whether prolonged additional reductions in heart rate variability (AddHRVr) can be measured in daily life with an algorithm that filters out changes in HRV that are purely due to metabolic demand, as indexed by movement, using a brief calibration procedure. We tested whether these AddHRVr periods were related to worry, stress, and negative emotions.Methods: Movement and the root of the mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) in heart rate were measured during a calibration phase and the subsequent 24 h in 32 participants. Worry, stress, explicit and implicit emotions were assessed hourly using smartphones. The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale and resting HRV were used to account for individual differences. During calibration, person-specific relations between movement and RMSSD were determined. The 24-h data were used to detect prolonged periods (i.e., 7.5 min) of AddHRVr.Results: AddHRVr periods were associated with worrying, with decreased explicit positive affect, and with increased tension, but not with the frequency of stressful events or implicit emotions. Only in people high in emotional awareness and high in resting HRV did changes in AddHRVr covary with changes in explicit emotions.Conclusions: The algorithm can be used to capture prolonged reductions in HRV that are not due to metabolic needs. This enables the real-time assessment of episodes of potentially detrimental cardiac activity and its psychological determinants in daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Prolonged physiological activation before or after stressors has gained recognition as a decisive element in theories that explain the link between stress and disease, specifically cardiovascular (CV) disease. This view is opposed to the conventional reactivity hypothesis that emphasizes responses during stressors. Purpose: Prolonged activity has not often been an explicit research goal of real-life stress studies. Nevertheless, a growing number of these studies have provided evidence for prolonged activity, often as a secondary research goal. Methods: An overview of this evidence is lacking and is provided in this article. Results: The combined data from the reviewed studies suggest that discrete and chronic stress sources, as well as negative emotional episodes and dispositions, are related to prolonged CV activity of various durations, including sleep periods. On the other hand, evidence supporting the assumption that prolonged stress-related activation predicts disease is still very modest. Conclusions: In this article we suggest that future research of prolonged activation should give priority to (a) the establishment of clear beginnings and endings of stressful events, (b) the prediction of disease by prolonged activation, and (c) potential psychological mediators of stress-related prolonged activation. These mediators may include, for example, worry and rumination, or other processes characterized by perseverative cognition, including unconscious processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]