Individual Differences in the Association Between Subjective Stress and Heart Rate Are Related to Psychological and Physical Well-Being

Abstract

The physiological response to stress is intertwined with, but distinct from, the subjective feeling of stress, although both systems must work in concert to enable adaptive responses. We investigated 1,065 participants from the Midlife in the United States 2 study who completed a self-report battery and a stress-induction procedure while physiological and self-report measures of stress were recorded. Individual differences in the association between heart rate and self-reported stress were analyzed in relation to measures that reflect psychological well-being (self-report measures of well-being, anxiety, depression), denial coping, and physical well-being (proinflammatory biomarkers interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein). The within-participants association between heart rate and self-reported stress was significantly related to higher psychological well-being, fewer depressive symptoms, lower trait anxiety, less use of denial coping, and lower levels of proinflammatory biomarkers. Our results highlight the importance of studying individual differences in coherence between physiological measures and subjective mental states in relation to well-being.

Keywords: coherence; open materials; physiology; subjective stress; well-being.

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: <?release-delay 12|0>The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Distributions of self-reported stress levels (top row) and heart rate (bottom row) for each phase of the stress-induction paradigm. Self-reported stress and heart rate histograms, with means and standard deviations, are represented for each of the five phases of the stress-induction testing procedure. The blue vertical line in the heart rate histograms represents a constant of 75 to support comparison across phases of the task. Heart rate is the average across 5 min for each phase of the task. Self-reported stress is a verbal report on a simple scale from 1 (not stressed at all) to 10 (extremely stressed), reported once near the end of each phase of the task. Thus, there was one average heart rate measure and one self-reported stress measure per participant for each of the five phases of the task; their association composed the stress–heart rate coherence measure. Stroop = Stroop color-word task; MATH = Morgan and Turner Hewitt task.

Fig. 2.

Association between stress and heart rate for high (1 SDabove the mean) and low (1 SD below the mean) levels of each well-being indicator and of denial coping. Gray shading represents 95% confidence intervals.

Fig. 3.

Stress–heart rate coherence across the sample. The top panel shows slopes for the association between self-reported stress and heart rate. Each line represents a separate participant, and colors indicate the strength of the association. The bottom panel shows the distribution of empirical best linear unbiased predictors (EBLUPs) for within-participants associations between stress and heart rate.