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Estimated cardiac vagal tone predicts fetal responses to mother's and stranger's voices
Author(s) -
Smith Laura S.,
Dmochowski Pawel A.,
Muir Darwin W.,
Kisilevsky Barbara S.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
developmental psychobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.055
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1098-2302
pISSN - 0012-1630
DOI - 10.1002/dev.20229
Subject(s) - vagal tone , psychology , tone (literature) , heart rate , audiology , fetal heart rate , heart rate variability , stimulation , fetus , medicine , neuroscience , pregnancy , blood pressure , art , literature , biology , genetics
Heart rate responses of 84 near‐term fetuses to recorded female voices were examined in 166 trials of auditory stimulation. Each fetus was presented with a 2‐min recording of their mother's voice and a 2‐min recording of a female stranger's voice, in counterbalanced order, with a 10‐min rest period between trials. High frequency heart rate variability during a 2‐min baseline period was used to estimate cardiac vagal tone for each trial. Differential heart rate responses to familiar and unfamiliar voice recordings were observed during a 2‐min poststimulus period, only when estimated cardiac vagal tone was high. This finding suggests that vagal tone plays a moderating role in the cardiac responses of term fetuses to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 49: 543‐547, 2007.