Depressed mood, brooding rumination and affective interference: The moderating role of heart rate variability

Facilitated processing of negative information might contribute to the etiopathogenesis and maintenance of depressive symptoms. Cardiac vagal tone, indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), is believed to represent a proxy of the functional integrity of the neural networks implicated in brooding rumination, affective interference and depression. The present study examined whether HRV may moderate the relation between brooding rumination, affective interference and depressive symptoms in a sample of healthy individuals (n = 68) with different degrees of depressed mood. Self-report measures of depression and brooding were collected, whereas the emotional Stroop task was employed to measure affective interference. Three-minute resting-state electrocardiogram was recorded to obtain time- and frequency-domain vagally mediated HRV parameters. Stepwise linear regression analyses revealed that HRV was a significant moderator of the positive association between depression and brooding rumination, but not of the association between depression and affective interference. An integrated model is supported, in which vagally mediated HRV appeared to potentiate the positive link between depressive symptoms and brooding rumination. Considering that HRV and brooding rumination were found to have an interacting role in determining the severity of depressive symptoms, they may represent potential clinical targets in the prevention and treatment of depressive symptoms.