BACKGROUND
Resilience is thought to be associated with how individuals perceive, experience, and react to stressful situations. Most previous research has focused on the psychosocial and behavioral aspects of resilience. More recently, researchers have started to investigate potential biological markers of resilience e.g., heart rate variability (HRV) and blood pressure (BP).
OBJECTIVE
The main objective of this research study was to investigate whether resilience influences cardiovascular recovery following exposure to acute stress.
METHODS
Physiological markers of stress (BP, heart rate (HR) and HRV) were collected to evaluate whether resilience affects stress recovery. Participants (N=72) completed a series of questionnaires (resilience, stress, psychological distress, stressful life events, anxiety, and affect) and two mental stress tasks: a mock interview task and an arithmetic task. A recovery period followed immediately after. HRV and HR were assessed continuously throughout the research study and participants BP was assessed at three separate instances. The physiological markers were divided into three sections of at least 5 minutes of recordings (HRV and HR) for this study including: baseline (before mental stress tasks), stress period (during the mental stress tasks) and the recovery period (after mental stress tasks).
RESULTS
The experimental manipulation was successful as participants rated their feelings of pressure higher after stress exposure (M=4.2) than before (M=3.0, P=.04). There were also significant increases in HR between baseline (M=79.9) and the last three minutes of the mental stress tasks (M=84.5, P< .001). Following stress exposure, the high resilience group demonstrated enhanced BP and HRV recovery (Root Mean Square of the Successive Differences, RMSSD) relative to the low resilience group (P<.001, P=.04 respectively). The model was not significant for HR or high frequency (HF), an alternative measure of HRV which indicates parasympathetic activity (P=.82, P=.22 respectively).
CONCLUSIONS
The findings suggested that the effects of resilience are only exhibited during recovery, following a stress episode. Those with high resilience showed enhanced BP and RMSSD recovery after acute stress. The results suggested that HRV (RMSSD) could be an indicator of resilience and a protective factor for both mental and physical health. This has implications for both interventions, future research and shows how important resilience is in physiological stress recovery.
CLINICALTRIAL
The research was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/rh8dw).