ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which statements about heart rate (HR) have been thought to have meaning in descriptive. It reviews the Lacey hypothesis, then the activation and emotion positions with reference to HR, and, finally, the cardiac-somatic hypothesis: a decreasing order of imputed behavioral significance for HR, but, as will become clear, an increasing order of degree of testability and empirical support. There are in regular and irregular data, in short, grounds for skepticism about any view of the motivational significance of HR. Some of the difficulties in bringing the hypothesis to test are mani-fest in studies addressing the question of "verbalization". The kind of question asked by a cardiovascular feedback hypothesis is how change in HR might facilitate taking in or rejecting stimuli of many degrees of complexity. Johnson and May compared the HR response during a reaction time task having a fixed 4-second foreperiod with the HR response during a 4-second time estimation task.
