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A Gift of Art For Donors Members and donors are enjoying the first of three pieces of lively art by painter Lois Eby as a thank-you gift from the Institute of HeartMath for their past contributions.

Scientific Monographs Positive emotions such as caring and happiness – what they mean, where they originate and how they’re generated – are central to two new scientific monographs.

Emotional Self-Management You hear this term a lot from the Institute of HeartMath, and it is widely referred to in a broad cross section of professional fields, including psychology/therapy and other areas of the medical community, business and corporate circles, education and others.

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Scientific Monographs Now Available to Public

It’s a Sunday afternoon in spring. A mother sits on a blanket in the park, watching her two children roll around on the grass. She feels happy and content, hoping they’ll always be this happy.

Positive emotions such as these – caring and happiness – and what they mean, where they originate and how they’re generated are central to two new scientific monographs the Institute of HeartMath is releasing as e-booklets. Each is a chapter in separate books^† and has been updated for individual release for the first time. They go on sale this month.

The first, Emotional Stress, Positive Emotions and Psychophysiological Coherence^†, was compiled and written by Dr. Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., and Dana Tomasino. The second, The Central Role of the Heart in Generating and Sustaining Positive Emotions^††, was compiled and written by McCraty, IHM’s executive vice president and director of research, and Robert A. Rees, Ph.D., the institute’s director of education and humanities.

Among the internal processes of the woman in the park is the experience of coherence, or more specifically, heart coherence, which the monographs explain. Heart coherence is a physical, mental and emotional state in which the heart, brain and all of the body’s physical systems function in harmony, resulting in a feeling of well-being and an actual improvement in well-being.

The monographs present HeartMath’s well-known research showing how the body and its systems respond to positive emotions and the effects of stress and negative emotions.

"Specifically," McCraty and Tomasino point out, "we examined the natural fluctuations in heart rate, known as heart-rate variability (HRV) or heart rhythms. … Utilizing HRV analysis, we have demonstrated that distinct heart-rhythm patterns characterize different emotional states. In general, emotional stress – including emotions such as anger, frustration, and anxiety – leads to heart-rhythm patterns that appear incoherent."

Conversely, "heart rhythms associated with sustained positive emotions are clearly more coherent (autocoherence) than those generated during a neutral or negative emotional experience."

Emotional Stress, Positive Emotions and Psychophysiological Coherence

McCraty and Tomasino look closely at and lay out the relationship between emotions and stress, presenting HeartMath’s research showing that the long-held theory that mental processes alone activate the "stress response" tells only part of the story. In fact, they write, "While mental processes clearly play a role in stress, it is most often unmanaged emotions that provide fuel for their sustenance. It is well recognized that thoughts carrying an ‘emotional charge’ are those that tend to perpetuate in consciousness. It is also emotions – more than thoughts alone – that activate the physiological changes comprising the ‘stress response.’ "

Also, the authors write, re-experiencing the emotions people feel during prior situations – good or bad – has a much greater impact on physiological processes than when the brain simply recalls those situations. Ultimately, "many of the deleterious effects of stress on the brain and body are in fact physiological repercussions of negative emotions," they observe.

In addition to presenting the evidence linking stress and emotions, this monograph offers a discussion titled "Breaking the Stress Cycle: The Power of Positive Emotions." Then it gives simple instructions for two of IHM’s most widely used methods for reducing stress and self-managing emotions: the Freeze-Frame and Heart Lock-In techniques, centerpieces of the HeartMath System.

Finally, the authors explain how important the heart is in our emotions, entailing far more than simply pumping blood throughout the body.

"The heart is the primary and most consistent source of dynamic rhythmic patterns in the body. … It is now established that the heart is a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, with an intrinsic nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a ‘little brain’ in its own right. Its circuitry enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain, and its rhythmic input to the brain reflects these processes."

Click here to purchase, Emotional Stress, Positive Emotions and Psychophysiological Coherence.

The Central Role of the Heart in Generating and Sustaining Positive Emotions

This monograph digs even deeper into the scientific nature and consequences of coherence and incoherence on human psychophysiology.

Citing IHM research over a number of years, it explains that sustained desynchronization in the autonomic nervous system, which can be caused by incoherence brought on by negative emotions, can lead to cortical inhibition. Cortical inhibition "impairs cognitive functions and diminishes one’s ability to think clearly, discriminate among behavioral choices, and self-regulate emotions."

In contrast, the research shows, "sustained positive emotions such as appreciation, compassion and love, generate a smooth, ordered, sine wavelike pattern in the heart’s rhythms," in other words, heart coherence.

"Psychologically, the coherence mode is associated with a calm, emotionally balanced, yet alert and responsive state that is conducive to improved cognitive and task performance, including problem-solving, decision-making, long-term memory and activities requiring perceptual acuity – attentional focus, coordination and discrimination, a state similar to that known as ‘flow.’ "

The monograph touches on the HeartMath System’s positive emotion-refocusing tools and techniques and using heart-rhythm coherence feedback training for learning to self-generate positive emotions. Then it delves into The Heart, Positive Emotions and Spirituality, an interesting glance at how the ancient world’s great nations and religions have viewed the heart, symbolically and in reality.

"The heart has long been associated with positive spiritual states," the authors note. "All faith traditions consider the heart the seat of positive emotions, including love, compassion, praise, and joy. From earliest recorded history, humans considered the heart a sacred center of human experience essential not only for the transfer of knowledge and for passing on wisdom, but for achieving and expressing transcendent spiritual feelings."

Click here to purchase, The Central Role of the Heart in Generating and Sustaining Positive Emotions.

† Emotional Stress, Positive Emotions and Psychophysiological Coherence was originally published in the book, Stress in Health and Disease, 2006, Bengt B. Arnetz, Rolf Ekman, editors. Wiley-VCH, Weinheim.

† † The Central Role of the Heart in Generating and Sustaining Positive Emotions, was originally published in the book, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2009, second edition, edited by Shane Lopez, and C.R. Snyder.