Impact of a Workplace Stress Reduction Program on Blood Pressure and Emotional Health in Hypertensive Employees

This study examined the impact of a workplace-based stress management program on blood pressure (BP), emotional health, and workplace-related measures in hypertensive employees of a global information technology company

Impact of the HeartMath Self-Management Skills Program on Physiological and Psychological Stress in Police Officers

This study explored the impact on a group of police officers from Santa Clara County, California of the HeartMath stress and emotional self-management training, which provides practical techniques designed to reduce stress in the moment, improve physiological and emotional balance, increase mental clarity and enhance performance and quality of life.This study provides evidence that practical stress and emotional self-management techniques can reduce damaging physiological and psychological responses to both acute and chronic stress in police, and positively impact a variety of major life areas in a relatively short period of time. In particular, results show that application of these interventions can produce notable improvements in communication difficulties at work and in strained family relationships, two areas that are well recognized to be major sources of stress for police

Facilitating Emotional Self-Regulation in Preschool Children: Efficacy of the Early HeartSmarts Program in Promoting Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development

Developed by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program is designed to train teachers to guide and support young children (3 -- 6 years old) in learning emotional self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies, with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social and cognitive development. This work reports the results of an evaluation study conducted to assess the efficacy of the EHS program in a pilot implementation of the program carried out during the 2006 -- 2007 academic year in schools of the Salt Lake City School District. The study was conducted using a quasi-experimental longitudinal field research design with three measurement moments (baseline and pre- and post-intervention panels) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA) instrument, a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring student growth in four areas of development -- social/emotional, physical, cognitive and language development. Children in nineteen preschool classrooms were divided into intervention and control group samples (N = 66 and 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 years), in which classes in the former were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority family backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and each of the four development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of ANCOVAs found a strong, consistent pattern of significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group who did not

Reducing Test Anxiety and Improving Test Performance in American's Schools: Summary of Results From The TestEdge National Demonstration Study Executive Summary

This Executive Summary provides an overview of the purpose, research methods, and major findings of the TestEdge National Demonstration Study, conducted by researchers at the Institute of HeartMath in collaboration with faculty and graduate students at Claremont Graduate University. The study's primary purpose was to investigate the efficacy of the TestEdge program in reducing stress and test anxiety and improving emotional well-being, quality of relationships, and academic performance in public school students

Reducing Test Anxiety and Improving Test Performance in American's Schools: Summary of Results From The TestEdge National Demonstration Study

This study determined the correlates and consequences of stress and test anxiety in a large sample of students (980) and investigated the effects of HeartMath tools among 636 of them who were part of an experimental group compared to the other 344 who were in a control group. Teachers received instruction in the Resilient Educator(R), which is designed to boost teacher performance, strengthen resiliency and improve school relationships, and students participated in the TestEdge(R) program, which features tools for reducing stress and test anxiety, improving academic performance and enhancing emotional and relational competence.The study tested two major hypotheses:Enhanced competence in emotional management through learning and practicing the TestEdge tools would result in significant improvements in student emotional self-regulation and psychophysiological coherence. These changes would produce a marked reduction in test anxiety and generate a corresponding improvement in academic and test performance.There would be associated improvements in stress management, emotional stability, and overall student well-being, as well as improvements in classroom climate, organization and function.We found consistent evidence of positive effects from the intervention on the students at the intervention school when their stress levels, emotional stability and the results of other measures were compared with those of students at the control school. Students in the experimental group had acquired the ability to self-activate the coherent state prior to taking an important test. This ability to self-activate coherence was associated with significant reductions in test anxiety and corresponding improvements in measures of emotional disposition

The psychophysiological basis of creativity and intuition: accessing 'the zone' of entrepreneurship

Successful entrepreneurs are innovators and risk-takers who appear to have an extraordinary ability to know where future business opportunities will eventuate and how to profitably actualize these ventures. The patterns of thought and action displayed by entrepreneurs are thus informed by an unusually high degree of both creativity and intuition. Research conducted by the Institute of HeartMath has made significant progress in elucidating the psychophysiological basis of creativity and intuition. We have identified a distinct psychophysiological state which appears to enhance creativity and intuitive perception. This state, termed psychophysiological coherence , is characterized by a system-wide shift toward increased order, synchronization, and harmony in an individual's physiological and psychological processes. We have shown that the coherent state is naturally activated during the experience of sustained positive emotions. This presentation will describe the physiological and psychological correlates of coherence and discuss how this state facilitates the processes underlying creativity and intuition. Examining creative and intuitive processes as body-wide phenomena, we will give particular attention to the important role played by interactions between the heart and brain. The second part of the presentation will introduce practical techniques and technology developed by the Institute of HeartMath to help people learn how to self-activate the psychophysiological coherence state at will

Transformational dynamics of entrepreneurial systems: organizational basis of intuitive action

Abstract not available

Transformational dynamics of entrepreneurial systems: holographic processes and the organisational basis of intuitive action

We develop a multilevel theory of the activation and regulation of bio-emotional energy in entrepreneurial systems to explain the transformational endogenous dynamics by which the entrepreneur's vision of a new future enterprise is realised. We begin with the premise that the entrepreneur is passionately committed to the implementation of a 'new' idea that moves beyond the norms or rationality of the existing business order, and that theentrepreneurial system is an order for generating innovative and/or radical economic change. Drawing on Bradley and Pribram's (1998) holographic theory of social communication, in which the principles of quantum holography are combined with complex dynamical systems theory, we describe how the socioemotional and psychophysiological energetic interactions within the entrepreneurial system operate to generate a stable platform of sychosocial organisation for building a transformational enterprise that is intuitively in-formed (given shape) by the entrepreneur's passionately-held vision of the future

The Coherent Heart: Heart–Brain Interactions, Psychophysiological Coherence, and the Emergence of System-Wide Order

This article presents theory and research on the scientific study of emotion that emphasizes the importance of coherence as an optimal psychophysiological state. A dynamic systems view of the interrelations between psychological, cognitive and emotional systems and neural communication networks in the human organism provides a foundation for the view presented. These communication networks are examined from an information processing perspective and reveal a fundamental order in heart-brain interactions and a harmonious synchronization of physiological systems associated with positive emotions. The concept of coherence is drawn on to understand optimal functioning which is naturally reflected in the heart’s rhythmic patterns. Research is presented identifying various psychophysiological states linked to these patterns, with neurocardiological coherence emerging as having significant impacts on well being. These include psychophysiological as well as improved cognitive performance. From this, the central role of the heart is explored in terms of biochemical, biophysical and energetic interactions. Appendices provide further details and research on; psychophysiological functioning, reference previous research in this area, details on research linking coherence with optimal cognitive performance, heart brain synchronization and the energetic signature of the various psychophysiological modes