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Higher Heart-Rate Variability Is Associated with Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activity and Increased Resistance to Temptation in Dietary Self-Control Challenges.

Silvia U MaierTodd Anthony Hare
Published in: The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (2017)
Self-control is associated with better health, but behavioral and psychometric self-control measures allow only indirect associations with health outcomes and may be distorted by reporting bias. We tested whether resting heart-rate variability (HRV), a physiological indicator of psychological and physical health, can predict individual differences in dietary self-control in humans. We found that higher HRV was associated with better self-control and improved predictions of choice behavior. Specifically, higher HRV was associated with more effective downregulation of taste temptations, and with a diminished neural representation of taste temptations during self-control challenges. Our results suggest that HRV may serve as an easily acquired, noninvasive, and low-cost biomarker for self-control ability.
Keyphrases
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