Multimodal cues for guided breathing
Georgios N. Marentakis, V. Grace, Jonathan C Berger · 2024
Guided breathing has been found useful for stress reduction and relaxation.Different types of cues have been used to guide breathing including visual, audio, haptic, and multimodal combinations.However, the possibility for a constructive or destructive interference due to multimodal cues to guided breathing has not been evaluated.In a controlled experiment, we investigated the effect of congruency between auditory and visual stimuli on guided breathing.Conditions included unimodal audio and visual cues as well as multimodal visual and audio cues whose congruency was manipulated to yield congruent as well as incongruent breathing cues.Participants reported stress levels after exposure using a visual analog scale.Stimuli were effective in reducing subjective stress levels in all conditions.However, there was no evidence for constructive or destructive interference in the subjective responses of participants.