Helping from the heart: Voluntary upregulation of heart rate variability predicts altruistic behavior

• High frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) indexes parasympathetic activity.
• In a novel biofeedback task people voluntarily upregulate HF-HRV.
• The success of HF-HRV upregulation predicts altruistic behavior.
• Self-induction of parasympathetic states may be implicated in altruistic behavior.

Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically, incidental increases in HF-HRV accompany positive social engagement behavior and prosocial action. Little is known about deliberate regulation of HF-HRV and the role of voluntary parasympathetic regulation in prosocial behavior. Here, we present a novel biofeedback task that measures the ability to deliberately increase HF-HRV. In two large samples, we find that a) participants are able to voluntarily upregulate HF-HRV, and b) variation in this ability predicts individual differences in altruistic prosocial behavior, but not non-altruistic forms of prosociality, assessed through 14 different measures. Our findings suggest that self-induction of parasympathetic states is involved in altruistic action. The biofeedback task may provide a measure of deliberate parasympathetic regulation, with implications for the study of attention, emotion, and social behavior.