In plain language
Does the body play a role in wisdom? Heart rate variability (HRV) — the natural variation in time between heartbeats — reflects the activity of the vagus nerve and has been linked to better executive functioning and emotion regulation. This study asked whether people with higher resting HRV also reason more wisely about social problems, and whether that depends on the mental perspective they take.
The researchers recorded resting heart activity in 150 adults in Australia, then randomly assigned them to reflect on societal issues either from a self-immersed perspective (first person) or a self-distanced perspective (as an observer stepping back from themselves). Their spoken reflections were coded for wisdom-related reasoning, such as recognising the limits of one's knowledge, acknowledging that the world changes, and considering and integrating others' viewpoints. In a separate task, participants judged a person performing morally ambiguous actions, and their answers were coded for balanced versus biased attributions.
The key result: higher HRV predicted wiser reasoning and less biased judgments — but only among people in the self-distanced condition. When people reasoned from a self-immersed perspective, HRV was unrelated to wisdom. The findings suggest that a healthy, flexible physiology provides cognitive resources for wise judgment, but those resources only translate into wisdom when people step back from their egocentric point of view. Wisdom, in other words, involves both the heart and the mind.
Key findings
- In the self-distanced condition, every one of six heart rate variability indicators was positively related to the prevalence of wisdom-related reasoning about societal issues (e.g., intellectual humility, recognising change, considering and integrating others' opinions).
- Higher HRV also predicted more balanced, less biased attributions when evaluating a person's morally ambiguous behaviour — again only in the self-distanced condition.
- In the self-immersed condition, there was no relationship between HRV and wisdom-related judgment, showing that physiology alone does not make people wise.
- The effects were robust across both time-domain and frequency-domain markers of high-frequency HRV, in a final sample of 150 adults (mean age about 25).
- A post hoc analysis found that the top 20% of wise reasoners had higher cardiac vagal tone than the rest of the sample regardless of experimental condition.
- This was the first direct test of the link between cardiac vagal tone and wisdom-related judgment, connecting behavioural neuroscience with the psychology of wisdom.
How to cite
APA
Grossmann, I., Sahdra, B. K., & Ciarrochi, J. (2016). A heart and a mind: Self-distancing facilitates the association between heart rate variability, and wise reasoning. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 68. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00068
BibTeX
@article{grossmann2016heart,
author = {Grossmann, Igor and Sahdra, Baljinder K. and Ciarrochi, Joseph},
title = {A Heart and A Mind: Self-distancing Facilitates the Association Between Heart Rate Variability, and Wise Reasoning},
journal = {Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience},
year = {2016},
volume = {10},
pages = {68},
doi = {10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00068}
}
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- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
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Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.