[Officer.com] It’s been a widely held belief that a police officer’s heart rate has a direct impact on how he reacts in stressful situations. The consensus has been that as the heart rate increases, fine motor skills decrease, thus limiting our ability to react swiftly and appropriately. That theory, however, has had its share of detractors who dispute the findings and question the validity of the testing. Recently, research results have been published that not only challenge those long-held beliefs, but also debunk the position that heart rate is a reliable predictor of police officer performance.The results of the surprising new research dealt with three specific areas of physiological arousal: officers’ verbal communication; nonverbal communication; and, tactical skills. The study, published April 2019 in Frontiers in Psychology, Differential Effects of Physiological Arousal Following Acute Stress on Police Officer Performance in a Simulated Critical Incident, found that heart rates are not a totally reliable predictor of officer performance. Please read on.
For years, law enforcement trainers have been studying the correlation between elevated heart rates and performance during stressful encounters and situations. Much of the research included the wearing of heart rate monitors that recorded base line heart rates and rates recorded during the confrontations. The results were predictable‐those participants’ heart rates were much higher during the encounter than before. Logical, right? But what did those findings prove? Particularly when many of those involved in the training successfully resolved the situation they confronted, even with elevated heart rates.