Immersion in a relaxing virtual reality environment is associated with similar effects on stress and anxiety as heart rate variability biofeedback
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Practicing guided breathing at 0.1 Hz in virtual reality yields psychological and physiological benefits. Nonetheless, it remains uncertain whether these effects surpass those induced in a real-world setting. Indeed, the potential influence of the virtual environment on perceived stress and anxiety is not yet fully understood. In this experiment, we aimed to compare the effects of heart rate variability biofeedback combining both haptic and visual cues in real and virtual reality settings among the same group of participants. Additionally, to discern whether the psychological benefits arise from viewing an environment in virtual reality or from the act of performing guided breathing in this specific setting, a “control” immersion condition was introduced. 36 healthy sport students (9 females) participated in this study, performing both the real and virtual reality protocols in a randomized order. Anxiety and stress levels were assessed using the STAI-Y questionnaire and a visual analog scale, respectively. Physiological effects were assessed through measures of heart rate variability, and the performance of cardiac coherence was compared between the real and virtual implementations of guided breathing. As expected, both real and virtual reality heart rate variability biofeedback led to similar physiological modulations and cardiac coherence performances. A decrease in stress and anxiety was observed in both protocols, particularly among participants who initially reported higher stress or anxiety levels. However, no additional changes in psychological states were observed when performing guided breathing while immersed in the virtual environment.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it