Complexity of everyday life heart rate dynamics and attentional control in healthy students.

Effective regulation of emotions requires the ability to voluntarily manage attention, i.e. attentional control (AC), which has been related to heart rate variability and vagal tone in laboratory based research.

Resting parietal electroencephalogram asymmetries and self-reported attentional control.

Research on electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetries and anxiety proneness has recently spread to emotion regulation capabilities. We studied whether attentional control (AC), a temperamental construct related to emotional regulation, was associated with asymmetrical patterns of resting EEG activity at the frontal and parietal regions, reflected not only in the α frequency band (8-13 Hz) but also in higher bands β1 (13-20 Hz) and β2 (20-30 Hz). Self-reports of AC and trait anxiety, and resting EEG recordings, were obtained from 58 healthy participants.

Resting parietal EEG asymmetry and cardiac vagal tone predict attentional control.

The present study explores both resting cortical EEG asymmetry and vagally-mediated heart rate variability (HRV), as an index for vagal tone, as physiological correlates of self-reported attentional control in a sample of 53 healthy young adults. Regression analyses indicate that higher vagally-mediated HRV and lower right-sided parietal activity in the β2 frequency range (20-30Hz) are significant predictors of larger attentional control. Results are in line with some of the basic features of the neurovisceral integration model and stress the role of parietal areas in attentional control capabilities, thus aiming to consider attentional control as a trait-like disposition.