A scoping review of heart rate variability in sport and exercise psychology

ABSTRACT

Sport and Exercise Psychology (SEP) often adopts physiological markers in theory and practice, and one measure receiving increasing attention is heart rate variability (HRV). This paper aimed to provide a scoping review of the use of HRV within SEP. The protocol was made available on the Open Science Framework. Study inclusion criteria were examination of HRV in SEP, using athletes or healthy populations, peer-reviewed and published in English. Exclusion criteria were non-peer reviewed work, animal studies, clinical populations, review or conference papers. In February 2022 a systematic search of Web of Science, PubMed and Sport Discus identified 118 studies (4979 participants) using HRV in sport psychology (71) or exercise psychology (47). Risk of bias was assessed via the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. A narrative synthesis revealed that HRV was assessed within a range of topics such as stress, overtraining, anxiety, biofeedback, cognitive performance, and sporting performance. Three key limitations within the field were discovered: limited application of theoretical frameworks, methodological issues with HRV measurement, and differing interpretations of HRV results. Future research should use vagally-mediated HRV as a marker of self-regulation and adaptation in SEP, consult relevant HRV theories prior to hypothesis development, and follow methodological guidelines for HRV.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical activity
• cardiac vagal activity
• vagus nerve
• parasympathetic activity
• sympathetic activity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of the Mind–Body Connections research group at Solent University and the Performance Psychology Department of the Institute of Psychology at the German Sport University for their constructive feedback on drafts of this manuscript. We would also like to specifically thank Dr. James Steele for creating Figure one.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note: EndNote automatic duplicate removal does not take into account differences in capitalisation of titles or differences in author name presentation, which provided a large number of manual duplicates as a result.

2 Note: two studies reported using two different devices (Frenkel et al., 2019; Gross et al., 2017).