Background: Polyvagal Theory explains how ingestive behaviors, similar to social behaviors, regulate autonomic state. From a Polyvagal perspective ingestive behaviors may supplement or replace social behavior as a strategy to regulate state, and eating disorders could be viewed as a dependence on ingestive (and not social) behaviors to regulate state.
The Polyvagal Theory
Evolutionary changes and adaptive functions in the autonomic nervous system
Humans retain a phylogenetically-ordered response hierarchy to challenges
The discovery of the three neural platforms that provide the neurophysiological bases for social engagement, flight/flight, and shutdown behaviours.
Social Engagement System and Psychiatric and Behavioral disorders
A description of the “face-heart” connection that forms a functional social engagement system
How our facial expressions, vocalizations, and gestures are regulated by neural mechanisms that are involved in regulating our autonomic nervous system
Relevance of the social engagement system to eating disorders
The Polyvagal Theory is an innovative theory that links the evolution of the autonomic nervous system to affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, vocal communication, and contingent social behavior. The theory describes how, via evolution, a connection emerged in the brain between the nerves that control the heart and the face. This face-heart connection provided the structures for a “social engagement system” that bridge bodily feelings with social engagement behaviors via facial expression, vocal intonations (prosody), and gesture. The Polyvagal Theory provides a more informed understanding of the automatic reactions of our body to safety, danger and life threat. This presentation will extend the construct of the “social engagement system” to include ingestive behaviors. The neural pathways defining the social engagement system are also involved in mastication, sucking, and swallowing. Thus, ingestive behaviors provide a mechanism to regulate autonomic state. Four points relating the social engagement system to eating disorders will be discussed: 1) eating disorders are strategies to regulate autonomic state, 2) eating disorders are indicators of the inability of social behavior to regulate autonomic state, 3) the possibility that ingestive behaviors, relative to social behavior, may be inefficient in regulating autonomic state, and 4) eating disorders may reflect a general inefficiency of the social engagement system, via ingestion or social behavior, in regulating autonomic state .
Stephen W. Porges, PhD, is Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University Bloomington. He also is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He has served as president of both the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences. In 1994 he proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that links the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system to social behavior and emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavioral problems and psychiatric disorders.
