**4. HeartMath Healthcare Research**

HeartMath is an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the natural, human, social, spiritual, and ecological sciences in its focus on heart-based research [9]. Coherence is a central concept. The fundamental vision and mission is to promote healthcare through research and education in personal, social, and global coherence.

Healthcare research findings from over 8000 researchers are freely downloadable from the research library 8000 compiled by HeartMath researchers. Over 400 additional studies undertaken by independent researchers have provided extensive external validity for the effectiveness of the HeartMath system, its methods, tools, and techniques. This is to be expected, as findings are generally based on evidence related to: 1. Physics; 2. Electromagnetics; 3. Cardiorespiratory activity, especially related to communication networks involving the vagus nerve; 4. The natural mechanism of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), whereby heart rate increases during inhalation and decreases during exhalation; 5. Coherent and incoherent heart rhythms, associated with positive and negative emotion, respectively; 6. Correlated heart rhythm mathematics; 7. Biofeedback conditioning principles and practices.

Pribram's [17] holonomic, dynamic systems theory provides the theoretical, scientific model for much of the HeartMath research. For example, the model proposes complex pattern identification brain functioning, with special reference to emotion, the amygdala, and the cardiovascular system, especially the vagus nerve. In the model, experiential imprints stored as sets of familiar patterns in the neural architecture are continually monitoring and interacting with internal environmental inputs from many rhythmic physiological processes, such as heartbeat, respiration, and digestion, as well as with external environmental and social processes that help organize sensory perception, cognition, feelings, and behavior. According to the model, emotions are energetic happenings generated immediately from the occurrence of discontinuities, or novel patterns that do not match familiar, ongoing, and recurring inputs. Emotions, especially negative emotions, are known to highjack cognition via stress-induced, amygdala-generated fight/flight/freeze responses [3]. It is therefore postulated that a direct effect of utilizing HeartMath tools and techniques is the intentional facilitation of a heart-based re-patterning effect from physiological coherence [9]. It is also hypothesized that this operates at the physiological, emotional, and cognitive levels through afferent cardiac signals, a positive feeling pattern match, and the associated cortical electrophysiological activity. Rigorous research has provided empirical support for these hypotheses. After appropriate practice, their great value is the ability to transform the energy of negative emotions into their polar opposites, e.g., anger into assertiveness, overwhelming panic into centered motivation, overexcitement into relaxed release, sadness into contentment; hatred into love [2].
