The power of teamwork as seen physiologically: The relationship between heart rate variability and social coherence
What is heart rate variability (HRV)?
Heart rate variability is a term that may not be familiar, but what the concept means is how much the rhythm of a person’s heartbeat varies. Our hearts appear to be beating regularly, but they do not necessarily move at a rhythm that is as steady as if it were measured with a ruler. The gap between each beat may be a little longer or shorter, making the rhythm somewhat unstable.
Heart rate variability is a representation of this instability in heartbeat rhythm, and it is known that in general, when the human body gets excited and the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the heart will beat faster and the rhythm will become comparatively steady, reducing heart rate variability, while when the body relaxes and the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, the heart will beat slower and in turn, the rhythm will become comparatively unstable and heart rate variability will increase.
In recent years, advances in measuring devices and techniques have made it easier to detect heart rate variability, but how does it affect relationships between people?
The relationship between heart rate variability and sociality
The paper I discuss today is a review article summarizing papers investigating the relationship between heart rate variability and sociality. The word “sociality” is stuffy, but it refers to the way we humans basically tend to form groups to do things. These groups may be a husband and wife, family, friends, a team, or something else, but we manage to achieve various things by paying attention to each other and cooperating.
We often say that a group “gets on well,” but according to this paper, teams perform better the more their heart rate variability is synchronized. Specifically:
- there are more kind acts and cooperative behavior;
- communication is more effective;
- social disharmony is lessened; and
- antagonistic interactions are fewer.
The paper also showed that there are specific training methods for synchronizing heart rate variability, which can improve team performance, and interestingly, that the members’ heart rate variability will end up synchronizing with each other if they are close to each other through the operation of strong electromagnetic fields created by the electrical signals of their hearts whether they are aware of it or not, similarly to how metronomes in the same room will tend to synchronize with each other.
I wondered whether being unsettled when an irritated person is nearby, or conversely feeling relaxed when a relaxed person is close is due to the operation of synchronizing heartbeats through electromagnetic fields. There appears to be some empirical research, so I would like to discuss it in future as well.
