The calculation of heart rate variability (HRV) is a popular tool used to investigate differences in cardiac autonomic control between population samples. When interpreting effect sizes to quantify the magnitude of group differences, researchers typically use Cohen’s guidelines of small (0.2), medium (0.5), and large (0.8) effects.
However, these guidelines were only proposed for use when the effect size distribution (ESD) was unknown. Despite the availability of effect sizes from hundreds of HRV studies, researchers still largely rely on Cohen’s guidelines to interpret effect sizes.
This dataset and script accompanies a manuscript describing an ESD analysis of 297 HRV effect sizes from case-control studies. A codebook is also provided with descriptions of the variable names from the datafile.