Regression I. Experimental approaches to regression

Complexity of heart rate variability during moral judgement of actions and omissions

Recent research strongly supports the idea that cardiac activity is involved in the organisation of behaviour, including social behaviour and social cognition. The aim of this work was to explore the complexity of heart rate variability, as measured by permutation entropy, while individuals were making moral judgements about harmful actions and omissions. Participants (N = 58, 50% women, age 21-52 years old) were presented with a set of moral dilemmas describing situations when sacrificing one person resulted in saving five other people. In line with previous studies, our participants consistently judged harmful actions as less permissible than equivalently harmful omissions (phenomenon known as the "omission bias"). Importantly, the response times were significantly longer and permutation entropy of the heart rate was higher when participants were evaluating harmful omissions, as compared to harmful actions. These results may be viewed as a psychophysiological manifestation of differences in causal attribution between actions and omissions. We discuss the obtained results from the positions of the system-evolutionary theory and propose that heart rate variability reflects complexity of the dynamics of neurovisceral activity within the organism-environment interactions, including their social aspects. This complexity can be described in terms of entropy and our work demonstrates the potential of permutation entropy as a tool of analyzing heart rate variability in relation to current behaviour and observed cognitive processes.

Regression II. Development through regression

As shown in our previous paper ('Regression I. Experimental approaches to regression', JAP, 65, 2, 345-65), the common mechanism of regression can be described as reversible dedifferentiation, which is understood as a relative increase of the proportion of low-differentiated (older) systems in actualized experience. Experimental data show that regression following disease (chronic tension headache) is followed by adaptation and an increase in system differentiation in that experience domain which contains systems responsible for that adaptation. The results of mathematical modelling support the idea that reversible dedifferentiation can be one of the mechanisms for increasing the effectiveness of adaptation through learning. Reversible dedifferentiation, which is phenomenologically described as regression, is a general mechanism for restructuring the organism-environment interactions in situations where behaviours that were effective in the past become ineffective. Reversible dedifferentiation has evolved as a component of adaptation when new behaviours are formed and large-scale modifications in the existing behaviours are required in the face of changes in the external and/or internal environment. Thus, the authors believe that this article provides evidence for Jung's view that regression is not only a 'return' to past forms of thinking, affects and behaviour, but that regressive processes provide a significant impetus for psychological growth and development.