The effect of a single session of slow-paced breathing on perceived stress - And the moderating role of Emotion Regulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Chronic stress poses a growing threat to mental and physical health, increasing the need for accessible and effective stress-reduction strategies. Slow-paced breathing (SPB), typically practiced at a rate of six breaths per minute, has been shown to reduce the experience of stress and enhance emotion regulation. However, individual differences in general emotion regulation ability may influence the effectiveness of such interventions. Aim: In this study, we aimed to investigate the immediate effects of a single SPB session on perceived stress and explore whether individual emotion regulation strategy use moderates its effectiveness. Methods: In a within-subject design, 46 healthy adults (M = 23.78, SD = 4.77) completed two laboratory sessions involving either SPB or an active control condition. Stress was elicited using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task, and changes in perceived stress were measured multiple times during the task by means of visual analogue scales. Individual emotion regulation strategy use was measured at baseline using the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Results: Our findings showed reduced stress over time, however, this reduction appeared in both the SPB and the normal breathing condition. Furthermore, among the emotion regulation strategies, only self-blame significantly predicted changes in perceived stress. No moderating effect of emotion regulation strategy use on the effectiveness of SPB was found. Conclusion: A brief SPB intervention did not significantly outperform a normal breathing control condition in reducing perceived stress. These findings underscore the importance of correct implementation of the breathing technique and careful control design, as elements like nasal or unconscious slower respiration may already induce relaxation. Future studies should address these limitations and incorporate physiological markers to better capture the specific effects of SPB.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".